Online Εvaluation of Earth Observation Derived Indicators for Urban Planning and Management

Extensive urbanization and growth of population density have acquired a paramount interest towards a sustainable urban development. Earth Observation (EO) is an important source of information required for urban planning and management. The availability of EO data provides the immense opportunity for urban environmental indicators development easily derived by remote sensors. In this study, the state of the art methods were employed to develop urban planning and management relevant indicators that can be evaluated by using EO data. The importance of this approach lies on providing alternatives for improving urban planning and management, without consuming time and resources in collecting field or archived data. The evaluated urban indicators were integrated into a Web‐based Information System that was developed for online exploitation. The results for three case studies are therefore available online and can be used by urban planners and stakeholders in supporting their planning decisions

Examining urban sprawl in Europe using spatial metrics

Urbanisation is a global phenomenon with an important impact on the quality of human life. Europe has been widely affected by urbanisation. One of the main characteristics of urban growth is sprawl, a negative form of urban expansion, which affects large cities and most types of urban landscapes. Spatial indicators are applied to CORINE Urban Morphological Zones (UMZ) changes in order to measure urban sprawl between 1990-2000 and 2000-2006 in 24 European countries. The indicators calculate urban morphological properties such as shape, aggregation, compactness and dispersion. The results revealed that the urban areas (UMZ) increased by 146% during 1990-2006 and the urbanisation becomes more circle-shaped and less complex where mostly sprawl occurs. Moreover, urban form becomes less clumped or aggregated. Therefore, due to accelerating rates of urban sprawl, European urban planning should intensify appropriate initiatives to avoid negative impacts on human life

Cokriging areal interpolation for estimating economic activity using night-time light satellite data

There is a strong correlation between economic activity, which can be measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the night-time light emissions data. Gross Domestic product is usually available in large aggregate units and therefore the disaggregation has become a necessity in urban and regional development. The night-time light data obtained by Defence Meterological Satellite Program - Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) are supplementary information for measuring GDP in disaggregated units. Cokriging areal interplation was used in this present study in order to disaggregate the GDP contained in 51 Greek administrative divisions NUTS 3. The final disaggregated units are the 1035 municipal divisions. The supplementary night-time light emission data were used as additional variable (proxy variable) to cokriging method. The results showed high performance because cokriging incorporates the spatial aurocorrelation and cross-correlation between the examined variables. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

The application of the model of cellular automata (CA) on the island of Skiathos, Greece

CA models are systems consisting of blisters - tesserae which interact in a simple manner even though they exhibit a complicated behavior. These models can produce very complex structures and can be used for exploration of an expanded spectrum of fundamental dynamics and development issues. It is an approach for modeling of open, complex and self-organized systems and emphasizes the ways in which local decisions can lead to the creation of global standards. A CA model is a discrete dynamic system in which space is divided into regular territorial cells and time progresses in discrete steps. Each cell in this system receives a state. The state of each cell is updated in accordance with local rules, for example, the state of a cell of a given moment depends on its situation and the situation of adjacent cells in the previous time step. In this paper, we used the thematic maps of 1996 and 2007 for the island of Skiathos for making the forecast for 2020. From the prediction, it was concluded that in 2020 in the island of Skiathos there would be an increase of urban areas and a reduction of the crop areas, the grasslands and the forest areas. These results would be useful for the spatial and environmental Planning of the island. © by PSP