GG3210: Remote Sensing engagement with water industry collaborators

Image: Students of GG3210: Remote Sensing engaging with collaborators from Scottish Water.

The GG3210: Remote Sensing module, taught by Dr TJ Young, has been featured in a case study highlighting pedagogic innovation by BlueSky, the UK’s leading aerial surveying company. Working with the Water Resilient Dundee Partnership in collaboration with catchment planners at Scottish Water and Dundee City Council, students taking the remote sensing module applied BlueSky’s ultra-high resolution aerial imagery to map the distribution of “green” and “grey” spaces across selected neighbourhoods in Dundee, in order to contextualise how the phenomenon of ‘urban creep’ is affecting issues such as flood risk. 

In the honours-level remote sensing module, students analysed satellite imagery to quantify land cover at the Earth’s surface and monitor their changes through time. As part of the remote sensing module, students engaged with catchment and strategic planners from Scottish Water in a half-day workshop, where students were introduced to the importance of green spaces in mitigating urban flood risk, as well as working with ultra-high resolution aerial photography provided by BlueSky to map the distribution of these spaces in the St Mary’s Neighbourhood. Due to the ultra-high resolution provided by the aerial photography used (down to 12.5 cm per pixel!), students were able to identify different types of green spaces, down to individual front and back yards! Importantly, the workshop taught students the importance of translating “raw” results into meaningful information that facilitates downstream decisionmaking—in this case, the urban planning of future green-blue infrastructure in St Mary’s. 

The various types of land cover surfaces in a city drastically influence its susceptibility to flooding, because some surfaces are more permeable than others. Urban “green” spaces, such as parks, gardens, allotments, and landscaped back yards, directly mitigate flood risk by absorbing water and intercepting rainfall, and removing excess surface water. In contrast, human-made “grey” spaces, which include pavements, roads, and car parks, are often built from concrete or tarmac and are impenetrable, resulting in water from rainfall pooling or flowing down these surfaces. Here, the water can only drain when it reaches a gutter or a permeable surface. Increasingly, towns and cities are looking to sustainable urban drainage systems as an innovative type of green-blue infrastructure to transform grey spaces into green spaces, whilst still retaining their original urban benefits. 

St Mary’s is a neighbourhood that will see significant changes in its blue-green infrastructure, and is currently in the planning stages in terms of its implementation across the neighbourhood. With this in mind, the output datasets produced by the module were not only useful but also timely to the catchment planning process at St Mary’s. Since the module workshop, these outputs have been fed into Scottish Water’s flood risk models, that then offers crucial insights into how, why, and where the implementation of blue-green infrastructure and sustainable urban drainage systems can best mitigate flood risk in the neighbourhood.