[SatNews] The final aim is to provide urban planning authorities and experts with advanced tools to help them identify optimal development strategies.
Indra is leading the European Decumanus R&D project, aimed at developing new geospatial intelligence to support urban development and improve quality of life in cities. These services will provide information on a range of variables related with climate, land use, energy and health aspects in different areas of a city.
Eleven companies and organizations in eight countries, all coordinated by Indra, will work for two and half years on the initiative. The final aim is to provide urban planning authorities and experts with advanced tools to help them identify optimal development strategies.
To adapt these geospatial services to the specific requirements of different cities, each of which faces distinct challenges and problems, the consortium will benefit from support from Antwerp, Helsinki, London (Kensington and Chelsea), Madrid and Milan as end users.
Decumanus will cover four kinds of key services. The first of these aims to provide city climate data, showing performance over time and how the variables impact different areas, allowing city planning to adapt accordingly. The second kind of service will allow land use to be monitored precisely, as this has a direct impact on temperatures and climate in a given zone.
Complementing these two services will be tools supporting use of georeferenced information on energy efficiency in different zones. This will help to identify where most CO2 is emitted, where energy is wasted in excessive lighting and buildings that make poor use of cooling or heating systems.
A final group of services will provide information related to health, including data on how urban growth, climate and air quality effect quality of life for citizens. These will also help authorities to prepare for heat waves and pollution and understand how they affect certain age groups, people with allergies and those with respiratory or cardiovascular problems.
The project follows on from other R&D initiatives run recently in Europe, aimed at exploiting information gathered by Earth observation satellites and other sensors.
These initiatives include Copernicus, the EU's most ambitious Earth observation program, in which Indra has been involved in establishing urban products, security and emergency data and land use information. As part of the same project, Indra has supplied benchmark layers such as the Digital Terrain, Hydrography (channels and bodies of water) and Grasslands Model, while it was also selected to process and store data from Sentinel 2 satellites. (GMES Urban Services, BOSS4GMES, GEOLAND2, SAFER, G-MOSAIC, G-NEXT, Initial GMES Service for Geospatial Reference Data Access, GIO-Land and GIO-Emergency projects).
The Decumanus project takes its name from the term used by ancient Roman planners for the east-west orientated road around which they structured their cities and settlements and which ran between the main gates. Learn more here.