30.08.23 - Nos villes vertes: KERMAP's Project Finds the French City with Most Vegetation

Do you know which French city has the largest vegetation cover?
 
You can find it out with the project " Nos villes vertes” from KERMAP, a free online platform for visualizing urban vegetation in over 34000 cities in France. The platform provides high-resolution maps of the urban vegetation with indicators providing consistent information at the scale of the French territory. 
 
The available results have been processed from aerial images (open data supplied by IGN - French Mapping Agency (Institut Géographique National) using AI methods capable of handling large amounts of data. The aim is to simplify the use and access to earth observation data with products that are easy to visualize and interpret. 
 
Why is it important ?
Due to the combination of urbanization and population density, cities are particularly vulnerable to heat wave episodes, which are becoming more frequent and more intense. Addressing the impact of extreme heat has become urgent to prevent health risks and deterioration in people's quality of life. Vegetation has proven its efficiency in mitigating the effects of extreme heat by lowering temperatures through shading and enhancing evapotranspiration, thereby reducing the ‘urban heat island’ effect. Vegetation also promotes biodiversity and trees store CO2. Therefore, greening the cities is a promising way of improving the resilience of urban areas, but it requires a comprehensive and accurate knowledge of the vegetation cover (in public and private areas) of the urban territory.
 
This overview of vegetation cover provides relevant information for assessing the importance attached to vegetation in cities. It can be used to encourage and guide decision-makers in their future urban planning by incorporating greening initiatives to improve the quality of life of their residents.
 
It would be interesting to apply the method to datasets from other countries.
 
#climatechange #heatwaves #greencities