Young scientists received high European award

Young scientists from the University of Tartu received the Copernicus Masters innovation competition DLR Environmental Challenge award. Project „Urban Analyser - Your City Development Tool“ allows you to see population and population change, number of new buildings, built-up area animations with fine time-steps and trend predictions from space.

„Urbanisation is a global mega-trend. During the past decades, millions of people have moved to live in big cities or to the proximity of big cities. The suburban regions grow geographically, challenging the infrastructure, especially transportation network, and stressing the environment, which might lead to undesirable results in case of poor planning and regulation. In order to make informed decisions about future developments accurate and timely information about the current situation, past dynamics and on-going trends is essential,“ said the head of the project Kaupo Voormansik.

The proposed service will offer high-resolution global urban development information based on Sentinel-1 data. The emphasis is on fine temporal dynamics mapping - possibility to extract changes with less than one-month time-steps, which makes it the fastest, the freshest, and the most robust information source about urban developments.

Anonymous mobile location based services (LBS) data will be used for estimating the population and detecting abandoned city blocks. The service will rely on Copernicus Sentinel-1 data.