SEN4RUS: exploiting Sentinels for supporting urban planning applications at city and regional levels in Russia

After the launch of the Copernicus Sentinels 1 (2014), 2 and 3 (2015) by the European Space Agency, the availability of free Earth Observation (EO) data streams will provide new opportunities for innovative scientific and commercial geo-information services. With their given spatial resolution and revisiting times, the potential of Sentinel missions to support a wide range of urban planning applications is high. Recently, the ERA.Net-RUS project GEOURBAN developed a set of EO-based indicators for urban planning and a software tool for their on-line evaluation. It focused on the local scale; however, planning in peri-urban areas is particularly important for Russia, given its huge territory and its high number of large cities and scattered settlements. Standard EO-based spatial datasets, such as the European Urban Atlas have proven to be valuable for planning. However, this data exists only for the large and medium European cities, but not for the Russian ones. To this end, the main objective of the SEN4RUS (exploiting Sentinels for supporting urban planning applications at city and regional levels in Russia) project is to take into account the specific requirements of urban planning in Russia to develop indicators that effectively exploit the information content provided by Sentinels in support of urban planning. Using the basic techniques developed by the GEOURBAN project, SEN4RUS will design and implement Sentinel-based services for planners that are tailored to the Russian requirements. A key instrument for the implementation of such services is the development of a Web-based Information System – WIS. Three Russian cities with different typologies and planning perspectives have been included as case studies. To engage users from these cities in the project, a Community of Practice approach will be employed. Adaptation of the SEN4RUS WIS to forthcoming missions have also been planned, thus a fully operational tool is expected in the future.

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