Users in transport and infrastructure apply to all manufacturing and physical supply in land but also marine domains including transport & logistics, utilities, construction, communication & connectivity, and tourism.
The users in smart cities are multiverse and include large number of profiles. This include urban planners, architects, spatial planning offices, urban policy makers, transportation/environment/health departments but also citizen themselves.
The users benefit from additional information and knowledge extracted from EO data. This information and knowledge can help them to better tackle with challenges arising from climate change and urbanization. As each urban area is unique, EO can provide relevant information by detecting, evaluating and measuring these localities.
This EO based information can be extracted on one occasion or continuously, benefiting from revisiting satellites. EO can support investigation of archive data to extract trends or by investigating current state to set a baseline. This baseline is then further used to monitor the changes or to assess the impact of different decisions and actions. In most cases, this information is further used in various GIS analyses or modelling procedures.
The topics where EO can contribute are as follows: urban land cover, urban heat islands, air/water/soil quality, tree/vegetation health, detection of invasive vegetation species, damage detection on buildings or infrastructure, development of infrastructure and many more.
As listed, EO can support various domains that can be fitted under Nature-based solutions (NBS). NBS have been gaining attention as multifunctional solutions that may help cities to address challenges arising from climate change and urbanization.
The concept of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) has evolved as an umbrella concept embracing concepts such as green/blue/nature infrastructure, ecosystem approach, ecosystem services or natural systems agriculture, natural solutions, ecosystem-based approaches, and ecological engineering. NBS can include solutions such as water purification, reduction of flood risk, or deliberate efforts to decrease temperature and improve air quality.
Monitoring the built environment provides information about urban structures, transport networks and particular infrastructure, e.g. dedicated to energy provision. It covers all urban and infrastructure related service/applications on site development information, planning support or suitability analysis. As well, it includes pressure and threats analysis on the urban areas.
EO is capable of monitoring infrastrcture in general, i.e. buildings (and their construction) and transport networks (roads, rails). Additionally, infrastructure for renewable energy harvesting (solar and wind farms, hydroelectric powerplants) and identification of suitable sites (through mapping solar radiation, wind roses, speed and direction, hydrological network mapping). A basis is land surface mapping for deriving digital elevation models (DEMs) that is required for modelling renewable energy potential and for spatial planning and landscape visibility analysis (visual impact assessments for planned infrastructure). Further, EO is capable of assessing damage from industrial accidents. A wide range of EO technologies is used here, infrastrcture can be directly detected and mapped with optical and SAR sensors, where the resolution depends on the targeted assets. DEMs can be generated from SAR and stereographic optical data. Wind energy related parameters can be derived from satellites focused on atmosphere and weather monitoring. Further, there are various GI methods in use, too (in particular focused on spatial planning and impact assessment).