Assessment of environmental quality of Bucharest urban area by multisensor satellite data

Abstract

Urban environmental quality is an important part of efficient urban environment planning and management. A scientific management system for protection, conservation and restoration must be based on reliable information on bio-geophysical and geomorphologic, dynamics processes, and climatic change effects. Synergetic use of quasi-simultaneously acquired multi-sensor data may therefore allow for a better approach of change detection and environmental impact classification and assessment in urban area. As is difficult to quantify the environmental impacts of human and industrial activities in urban areas , often many different indicators can conflict with each other. The spatial and temporal distribution of land cover is a fundamental dataset for urban ecological research. Based on Landsat TM, ETM, SPOT and SAR data for Bucharest metropolitan area in Romania, it was performed a land cover classification based on spectral signatures of different terrain features used to separate surface units of urban and sub-urban area . A complete set of criteria to evaluate and examine the urban environmental quality, including the air pollution condition indicators, water pollution indicators, solid waste treated indicators, noise pollution indicators, urban green space have been widely used .