Analysis of Urban Green Spaces Based on Sentinel-2A: Case Studies from Slovakia

Monika Kopecká, Daniel Szatmári and Konštantín Rosina
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Monika Kopecká: Institute of Geography, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Štefánikova 49, 814 73 Bratislava, Slovakia
Daniel Szatmári: Institute of Geography, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Štefánikova 49, 814 73 Bratislava, Slovakia
Konštantín Rosina: Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Via E. Fermi 2749, I-21027 Ispra, Italy

Land, 2017, vol. 6, issue 2, 1-17

Abstract: Urban expansion and its ecological footprint increases globally at an unprecedented scale and consequently, the importance of urban greenery assessment grows. The diversity and quality of urban green spaces (UGS) and human well-being are tightly linked, and UGS provide a wide range of ecosystem services (e.g., urban heat mitigation, stormwater infiltration, food security, physical recreation). Analyses and inter-city comparison of UGS patterns and their functions requires not only detailed information on their relative quantity but also a closer examination of UGS in terms of quality and land use, which can be derived from the land cover composition and spatial structure. In this study, we present an approach to UGS extraction from newly available Sentinel-2A satellite imagery, provided in the frame of the European Copernicus program. We investigate and map the spatial distribution of UGS in three cities in Slovakia: Bratislava, Žilina and Trnava. Supervised maximum likelihood classification was used to identify UGS polygons. Based on their function and physiognomy, each UGS polygon was assigned to one of the fifteen classes, and each class was further described by the proportion of tree canopy and its ecosystem services. Our results document that the substantial part of UGS is covered by the class Urban greenery in family housing areas (mainly including privately-owned gardens) with the class abundance between 17.7% and 42.2% of the total UGS area. The presented case studies showed the possibilities of semi-automatic extraction of UGS classes from Sentinel-2A data that may improve the transfer of scientific knowledge to local urban environmental monitoring and management.

Keywords: urban green spaces; Sentinel-2A; ecosystem services; Slovakia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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