Utilities (water, electricity, waste): Power station operators, Water plants operators, Survey companies, Hydroelectric suppliers, Regulatory Bodies, Distribution companies, Landfill and waste, Regional planners / policy makers.
The benefit from EO information that monitor pollution in rivers and lakes, assess changes in the carbon balance, assess environmental impact of human activities, monitor land pollution, assess changes to urban and rural areas, assess and monitor water quality, assess ground water and run-off.
Users of EO/GI in communications and connectivity are mostly mobile telecommunications providers and fixed telecommunication providers. Theire business is to connect people via telephone and internet. The assets for their services include the infrastructure of communication networks physically installed in the ground, the cellphone towers distributed over the land surface, particularly in higly populated areas, as well as other installations (e.g. company buildings) and equipment (communication satellites).
Specific spatial questions of these users are concerned with the reception quality that the network can provide in an area. The network coverage would neet to react to changes of the built environment. New settlement infrastructure may cause a new population distribution and subsequently the need to network adaptations to cover new areas or cover some areas with higher band widths because more people are living there. Additionaly, the coverage of cellphone antennas depends on the arrangement of environmental obstacles that degrade or block the radio signal. Any place where the built environment or the vegetation changes can change the reception quality within the covered area of an existing cellphone tower.
The benefit of EO information for the user group of communications and connectivity comes from monitoring building development, assessing changes to urban and rural areas, and mapping line of sight visibility (terrain height, land cover).
Users in financial and digital services cover a broad area of activity that touches on many other market sectors such insurance & real estate, retail, news & media and digital interfaces. The categories included are identifiable as a “service” (tertiary sector: attention, advice, access, experience, and affective labour) and not part of the physical supply of goods.
Users in ICT include fixed and mobile telecommunications providers. They can make use of EO/GI data by monitoring building development and changes to urban areas.
Users in urban development and users involved in the development of rural settlements perform tasks on local and regional scale (to the scale of nations). These users benefit from EO information to manage the use of land & its impacts. Users such as urban planners, architects, spatial planning offices, urban policy makers in public/private sectors in smart cities or generic urban local/regional planning belong to this category. EO/GI becomes a key data and information to support Sustainable Development Goals - SDG 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities in particular to set up at geospatial and temporal basis the evolution of urban environmental and socioeconomical factors for a better distribution and equality of resources, benefits and impacts (environmental urban justice maps)
The community of users in education includes instructors (1) who are teaching or conducting research in some aspect of GIScience, such as coding, remote sensing, field methods, geodetic control, web mapping, spatial analysis, or related topics, or (2) who are using GIS as a teaching tool in a discipline, such as business, biology, economics, or health sciences. By extension, this community includes students and supportive deans and other educational administrators. The benefits that these users gain from EO information includes a set of best practices vetted by experts in the field that they can use to teach modern GIS workflows more effectively.
The goals of this user community are focused on a deeper and a broader implementation of geotechnology, methods, and spatial data throughout the educational system—primary, secondary, university, and lifelong learning (libraries, museums, and other informal settings). Deeper implementation implies embracing GIS as a platform, including its field data gathering tools and citizen science workflows, spatial analysis, building web maps and apps, communicating with multimedia maps derived from web GIS, systems configuration work, and the coding that is behind modern GIS infrastructure. Broader implementation implies the use of GIS in a multitude of disciplines at all levels of education, formal and informal; occurring wherever changes over space and time are being examined.
At all levels of education the challenge of sufficient bandwidth and the use of a professional systems-based tool such as GIS, along with devices capable of running web GIS tools, are barriers in many areas throughout the world. However, educational and societal forces represent a stronger challenge than technological ones. These educational and societal challenges that this user community faces include the lack of educational content standards at the primary and secondary level that support the use of geotechnologies in education, and at the university level, a lack of awareness of and access to modern SaaS GIS tools and open data portals.
The risks that the community faces in not facing the challenge of the use of GIS in the education sector is a lack of geographic and spatial literacy among students and faculty. This will translate to research that does not consider spatiotemporal implications of 21st Century challenges, a workforce ill-equipped to deal with them, and consequently an increasingly unstable and dysfunctional world. To build a workforce that can meet global challenges in energy, biodiversity, climate, natural resources, natural hazards, human health, economic inequality, and others, a deep and wide implementation of GIS technology and methods must take place throughout the educational system. The actions that society can take to face that challenge is to provide professional development opportunities for faculty, curricular resources, assessment instruments, relevant spatial data and open data portals, examples of best practices, and a network for educators and researchers in which to interact. EO can provide all of these elements in partnership with educational institutions, government, nonprofits, and industry to meet this challenge. In so doing, an increasingly sustainable, healthier, resilient world can be achieved from the community to the global level.
Citizens and society in general use and engage with EO services through mobile devices, social media platforms, apps. We do also categorize in this section the users in education, research and training providing knowledge and learning outcomes.
Active and engaged citizens are one of the main driving forces of EO/GI. Nowadays, there is a growing amount of location-based contents generated by connected “produsers”, mainly equipped with smartphones. The exponential growth of ambient geographic information through social networks became the basic feature of a spatially enabled society, in which it behaves as a vessel where millions of people share their current thoughts, observations and opinions, showing to provide more reliable and trustworthy information than traditional methods like questionnaires and other sources.
A spatially enabled citizen is explained through his ability to express, formalize, equip (technologically and cognitively), and (un)consciously activate an efficiently use of his spatial skills. Harvesting this ambient geospatial information provides a unique opportunity to gain valuable insight on information flow and social networking within a society, support a greater mapping, understand the human landscape and its evolution over time. With these insights, city planners can make use of the gathered affective data to detect positive or negative trends developing in the city, managing to take early countermeasures.
Nevertheless, assembling and analyzing EO/GI provide us with unparalleled insight on a broad variety of cultural, societal, and human factors, particularly as they relate to human and social dynamics, for example: 1) mapping the manner in which ideas and information propagate in a society, information that can be used to identify appropriate strategies for information dissemination during a crisis situation. 2) Mapping people’s opinions and reaction on specific topics and current events, thus improving our ability to collect precise cultural, political, economic and health data, and to do so at near real-time rates. 3) Identifying emerging socio-cultural hotspots.
Worldwide countries follow a digital agenda for the economy and initiatives to foster new skills among the workforce to cope with transformation processes with massive impact on the labour market.
"Sustainable urban development is a goal of the global society. It summarizes a specific set of problems that cities face all over the world. Cities want to provide a high quality of life to their residents. However, this goal is threatened by urban growth at the cost of urban green infrastructure’s accessibility by citizens etc. Communities that address this: C40 (association of the largest cities of the globe), CitiesIPCC, related SDGs of the UN, etc. Skills: Explain how the monitoring of urban areas contributes to sustainable urban development through its capability to provide regularly updated information about the benefit of urban green infrastructures and their ecosystem services to the quality of life in a city
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EO technologies (both optical and SAR) are capable to categorize bio-physical coverage of land to produce land cover maps like CORINE Land Cover (CLC). The EO method is objective and allows for frequent updates. EO-derived land cover is an excellent basis for mapping land use, the socioeconomic use that is made of land. Land use products are used in a wide range of applications (e.g. agriculture, forestry, spatial planning, determining and implementing environmental policy, land accounting). In a humanitarian context, land use mapping is applied to map refugee camps, population and pressures on population that cause migration.
Monitor critical information about offensive and defensive systems. This deserves a category in its own right since the nature of observations is quite different from many others.