Urban Green Infrastructure Monitoring Using Remote Sensing from Integrated Visible and Thermal Infrared Cameras Mounted on a Moving Vehicle

Abstract

Climate change forecasts higher temperatures in urban environments worsening the urban heat island effect (UHI). Green infrastructure (GI) in cities could reduce the UHI by regulating and reducing ambient temperatures. Forest cities (i.e., Melbourne, Australia) aimed for large-scale planting of trees to adapt to climate change in the next decade. Therefore, monitoring cities’ green infrastructure requires close assessment of growth and water status at the tree-by-tree resolution for its proper maintenance and needs to be automated and efficient. This project proposed a novel monitoring system using an integrated visible and infrared thermal camera mounted on top of moving vehicles. Automated computer vision algorithms were used to analyze data gathered at an Elm trees avenue in the city of Melbourne, Australia (n = 172 trees) to obtain tree growth in the form of effective leaf area index (LAIe) and tree water stress index (TWSI), among other parameters. Results showed the tree-by-tree variation of trees monitored (5.04 km) between 2016–2017. The growth and water stress parameters obtained were mapped using customized codes and corresponded with weather trends and urban management. The proposed urban tree monitoring system could be a useful tool for city planning and GI monitoring, which can graphically show the diurnal, spatial, and temporal patterns of change of LAIe and TWSI to monitor the effects of climate change on the GI of cities.

Instrumentation and Monitoring of Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Stormwater Control

“…Existing literature has focused mainly on instrumentation and monitoring of a single site with one specific type of green infrastructure and does not consider designs for instrumentation that can be applied across a wide variety of NBS at different scales and across different regions. [6][7][8][9][10][11] Regional assessments to date have used satellite-based data products or other remote sensing methods, and do not include methods for in situ monitoring of NBS. [12][13][14][15] Prior reviews of the methodologies and frameworks for monitoring NBS have largely focused on quantifying the impact on urban heat mitigation or benefits to urban biodiversity, and not the hydrological benefits.…”

Can Remote Sensing Fill the United States’ Monitoring Gap for Watershed Management?

“…Within watersheds, indices developed by using reflectances from different spectral bands are useful for classifying land cover and land use types [13]. Also within watersheds, the state of best management practices such as low impact developments and green infrastructure can be monitored using visible and thermal imagery and spectral reflectance-based indices [14].…”

Neural network‐based optical flow versus traditional optical flow techniques with thermal aerial imaging in real‐world settings

“…There are many reasons why it is more difficult to test a sensor suite designed for night, including higher cost for thermal sensors, the difficulty to operate the aircraft after dark due to regulation restriction and challenges of launching and recovering small aircraft at night. Beside being utilized for navigation, thermal sensor has been used in agriculture to monitor crops (Speth et al, 2022), infrastructure monitoring (Chokkalingham et al, 2012;Fuentes et al, 2021;Stypułkowski et al, 2021;Wu et al, 2018), objects detection and tracking (Leira et al, 2021;Liu, Li, et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2017Liu et al, , 2022.…”