This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Ramkumar Yaragarla
Over the past few months, I have been exploring and researching how remote sensing and open satellite data can help us understand how our cities are changing, especially the balance between green cover and built-up areas.
At this juncture, as part of my research at I Hug Trees, I focused on Melbourne, Australia as a case study. I live here. The goal was simple: to see how much greenery the city still holds and how fast concrete is replacing it. Importantly, what this means for the city's sustainability.
For this project, I used Sentinel-2 imagery, which is 10m resolution to calculate NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) for greenery, and 30m resolution to derive NDBI (Normalised Difference Built-up Index) for urban surfaces.
I want to talk about the technical challenges here vis a vis aligning datasets with different spatial resolutions and projections. I spent quite some time experimenting with resampling methods, re-projection, and bounding boxes to get the NDVI and NDBI layers to align correctly over the same area. Both the 10m and 30m datasets need to aligned to compare them for heat sensitive areas in the city.
Also selecting the right Sentinel-2 tile for my area of interest was another interesting challenge. Melbourne sits across multiple tiles, so I had to first map out the tile boundaries before deciding which one captured the city’s key urban areas and green corridors.
Despite all the technical hurdles, the outcome was incredibly rewarding. Once the data was aligned, I could visualize the contrast between Melbourne’s shrinking green zones and expanding built-up regions.
I request you to have a look at this work and analysis at Melbourne Urban Green Cover Dataset Research brief page.
If you tried similar geospatial projects, please let me know if you have experienced similar challenges. Cheers. Ram
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Ramkumar Yaragarla
Ramkumar Yaragarla | Sciencx (2025-10-26T04:11:19+00:00) Remote Sensing for Urban Green Cover: My Research Journey with Melbourne. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/10/26/remote-sensing-for-urban-green-cover-my-research-journey-with-melbourne/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.