Green Urban Sat Grand Nancy

OVERVIEW

Today, actors of territory arrangement face different challenges such as climate change adaptation, biodiversity preservation, energetic efficiency and sobriety, maintaining a comfortable and healthy living environment for the inhabitants. In highly urbanized zones, it is admitted that integration and preservation of nature-based solutions (NBS) constitute an essential lever to meet these stakes. These work, systems or natural areas are often characterized by a vegetal component and contribute to the resilience of cities, in terms of attenuating heat islands or rending pervious again the soil to limit floods (whose frequency will be radically increased at 2100 horizon).

The benefits that can be drawn from NBS are qualified as ecosystem services (ES) and are surveyed by the scientific community. It is admitted that the existing tools to evaluate those ES on a given area, with an integrated multi-criteria vision, are not mature enough for operational applications, in particular for small spatial units and for complex and heterogeneous environments such as urban areas. Green Urban Sat will endeavor to compensate for this shortcoming.

The project “Des Hommes et Des Arbres” (“Humans and Trees”) and Nature4Cities constitute the conceptual and thematic frame of Green Urban Sat.

© Cerema, translated by SCO

Green Urban Sat will produce a fine description of vegetation at conurbation scale. This description will provide a set of quantitative attributes and indicators that will allow to feed a group of decision aid tool indicators that are supported by ecosystem services : climate regulation, air quality regulation, contribution to ecologic continuities, socio-cultural benefits.

A classification of (peri-urban) vegetation shapes will be produced, as well as morphological and structural 2D and 3D indicators, suited to the vegetation typologies corresponding to the description of the settlement and configuration of different shapes of vegetation.

The indicators are built from multi-temporal and stereoscopic imagery from the Pléiades and Pléiades Neo satellites, and the associated 3D products. The methods will rely on data cubes exploited by artificial intelligence algorithms. The demonstrator produced on the area of « Grand Nancy » will be presented as a graphical user interface and will allow users to visualize and interact with the proposed indicators.

The partners of this project form a pluri-disciplinary team able to handle with all the tasks necessary to the achievement of the project. The skills include scientific aspects relative to urban remote sensing, nature-based solutions and ecosystem services knowledge, the capacity of producing and implementing methodologies based on imagery and industrialization of the process. The final users who have expressed the terrain need will be largely involved in the project.

AREAS OF EXPERIMENTATION

• Nancy : main partner of experimentation
• Strasbourg : area of replicability tests

DATA

Pléiades and Pléiades Neo images and associated 3D models

EXPECTED RESULTS

• Demonstrator of a graphical user interface with vegetation indicators on the Nancy conurbation on TerraNIS website
• Available algorithms on Theia Platform and Cerema Github

Related SCO projects

• Thermocity
• Sat LCZ

Project news

• 24/05/2023 : GUS, mid-term review
• 20/04/2023 : Cerema's satellite unit tests the use of new Pleiades Neo images to improve the mapping of urban vegetation (in French)
• 16/03/2023 : GUS presentation at the FERED forum (French federation of research in environment and sustainability)
• 16/03/2023 : Presentation at the Digital Event Challenge Pleiades Neo
• 02/02/2023 : Presentation at the Remote Sensing for the Study of the Urban Environment workshop of the Theia cluster
• 29/11/2022 : Poster for the lab/company day
• 13/07/2022 : 🎥 Presentation of the Green Urban Sat project and its progress at the 5th Quarterly Meeting of the SCO France on the theme "Pleiades data in SCO projects"
• 12/08/2021 : Using satellite imagery to finely characterize vegetated forms: the Green urban Sat project (Cerema article, in French)