AISEM Presents

Monitoring the Earth from above: Mining satellite data to map urbanization at local to global scales

Annemarie Schneider
Assistant Professor, Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment and Department of Geography

For the first time in history, more than 50 percent of the Earth’s population now live in cities, towns and settlements. From an environmental standpoint, cities consume enormous amounts of resources, the by-products of urban activity and land use are numerous, and recent studies demonstrate that the ecological footprint of many cities is significant and not sustainable. Cities are also emerging as an important source of uncertainty in local, regional and global-scale biogeophysical processes. Urban land use influences local climates through urban heat islands, impervious surfaces alter sensible and latent heat fluxes, and recent evidence has suggested that cities may also significantly affect precipitation regimes. Accurate and timely information on the distribution and nature of urban areas is therefore critical to a wide array of research questions related to the effect of humans on the regional and global environment

This talk will describe how remotely sensed data - used in conjunction with data mining algorithms, spatial statistics, and socio-economic and demographic data - have begun to play a substantive role in investigating alterations of the Earth’s surface within and near urbanized areas, and in monitoring and modeling these changes. At the global scale, my recent work has focused on a new map of global urban extent developed using the fusion of multiple remote sensing and ancillary data inputs. At the local scale, my research has aimed to understand urban land use trajectories across multiple time points by quantifying rates and patterns of expansion in a sample of 40 cities across the globe, with a specific focus on rapidly urbanizing regions in China. Finally, I will review the opportunities and challenges of using satellite data to monitor landscape processes, including the benefits of incorporating new processing algorithms and unique data sources to characterize heterogeneous urban environments.

Bio:

Annemarie Schneider in an Assistant Professor in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies with an affiliated appointment in the Geography Department. Dr. Schneider earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography and Environmental Science at Boston University. Before arriving in Madison in 2007, she was a faculty member at the Department of Geography and Institute for Computational Earth System Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 This talk is part of the AI In the Wild series.  For more information, including upcoming talks, click here.