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Earth Observation Based Understanding of Canadian Urban Form

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Advances in Remote Sensing for Infrastructure Monitoring

Part of the book series: Springer Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry ((SPRINGERREMO))

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Abstract

The state of urban land spatial structure, commonly referred to as urban form, for a given city reflects the cumulative impacts of past and present human activities. Conversely, the urban form influences urban activities, resources consumption and the environment. To improve understanding of the impacts of urban form and related urban issues, accurate description of urban land structure is a key information requirement, which include geospatial distributions of land use, surface characters and features derived from remote sensing imagery, as well as from integration and inference of supporting information from diverse sources. This paper presents the results of research on Canadian urban form including land use, land surface characterizations and changes, as well as the relationship of urban form with urban activities, urban commuting as an example, for improvement of understanding of the urban form and its impacts by using spatial information from image data at pixel level. The scope of this research is in a broad range in nature and includes information extraction from remote sensing image data, integration of land use time-series maps from diverse historic sources and finally spatial analysis and modeling of urban land structure impacts on intra-urban commute transportation. This paper presents an example of this data-information-knowledge processing.

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Acknowledgement

The author thanks Dr. Bert Guindon for collaboration in the research works presented in this paper; Ms. Krista Sun for her preprocessing of the spatial and demographic data used in this paper; Ms. Nancy Hoffman of Statistics Canada and Mr. Peter Reilly-Roe (previously in Office of Energy Efficiency, Natural Resources Canada) for discussions and constructive advice, the City of Ottawa, the City of Toronto and GEOBase team members of Natural Resources Canada for providing related information or data, the Canadian Space Agency for partially funding aspects of the research presented in this paper, the anonymous reviewer and Ms. Lucia Huang for helpful comments that have improved the manuscript.

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  1. Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation, Natural Resources Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Ying Zhang

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  1. President, EOSPATIAL, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Vernon Singhroy

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Zhang, Y. (2021). Earth Observation Based Understanding of Canadian Urban Form. In: Singhroy, V. (eds) Advances in Remote Sensing for Infrastructure Monitoring. Springer Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59109-0_10

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