Maintaining or expanding urban green spaces all-year-round introduces an uneasy tension between "greening cities" and "water saving" due to increased use of scarce blue water resources to maintain this greenness, particulary in dry regions or dry months of year.
Urban green spaces (UGS), like most managed land covers, are getting progressively affected by water scarcity and drought. Preserving, restoring and expanding green spaces in cities require sustainable management of green and blue water resources to fulfil evapotranspiration (ET) demand for green plant cover. The heterogeneity of UGS with high variation in their microclimates, vegetation species and water availability builds up the complexity of ET estimation. Often in‐situ approaches are not feasible or too expensive. We study the ET, water consumption and water footprint (WF) of urban greenery using different methods of remote sensing (RS), modelling and in-situ (ground-based) in different climates and geographical settings.We have several ongoing collaborative projects on this topic listed below:
1. Assessing the spatio-temporal changes in the ET, greenness and water demand of urban greenery (2018-2023)
- Assessing the impact of spatial resolution of satellite images (WorldView2, Landsat and MODIS) on the estimation of ET and water consumption of UGS
- Monitoring the greenness of UGS using vegetation indices (VIs) such as NDVI, EVI and EVI2
- Assessing the long‐term intra‐ and inter‐annual variations of VIs and ET
- Modelling urban ET using GIS/RS, eddy covariance (EC tower) and artificial intelligence
- Comparing RS‐ET against the in-situ ET method
Members of the agronomy division involved in the study:
Dr. Hamideh Nouri
Students’ projects:
Ms Stenka Vulova (TU Berlin), PhD (2019-2022) – Heat and vapour fluxes of urban vegetation patterns – a remote sensing-based approach
Members of the agronomy division involved in the study:
Dr Hamideh Nouri, Prof. Stefan Siebert
Students’ projects:
Ms Julia Riama Silalahi, BSc student (2020-2021), The impact of climate on the water footprint of urban green spaces
Members of the agronomy division involved in the study:
Dr Hamideh Nouri
Students’ projects:
Ms Jule Sophie Becker, BSc student (2020-2021),The impact of urban green spaces on cities and their inhabitants; benefits and services of different types of urban green spaces to alleviate challenges arise from ever-growing urbanization and climate change.
Collaborators:
- U.S. Geological Survey: Dr Pamela Nagler
- University of Arizona: Dr Kamel Didan, Dr Armando Barreto Munez
- Isfahan Agricultural and Natural Resources Research Center of Iran: Dr. Sattar Chavoshi Borujeni
- Monash University: Dr. Sina Alaghmand
- Technische Universität Berlin: Ms. Stenka Vulova, Prof. Birgit Kleinschmit, Dr. Alby Rocha, Dr. Fred Meier
- University of Twente: Prof. Arjen Hoekstra
Publications (2019 onward)
Journals:
- Berger, M., Campos, J., Carolli, M., Dantas, I., Kosatica, E., Kramer, A., Mikosch, N., Nouri, H., Schlattmann, A., Schmidt, F., Scomberg, A. & E. Semmling, in press. Advancing the water footprint into an instrument to support achieving the SDGs – Recommendations from the Global Resource Water (GRoW) research initiative. Water Resource Management. DOI:10.1007/s11269-021-02784-9
- Vulova, S., Meier, F., Rocha, A.D., Quanz, J.,Nouri, H., Kleinschmit, B. Modeling urban evapotranspiration using remote sensing, flux footprints, and artificial intelligence, Science of The Total Environment, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.147293
- Nouri, H., Nagler, P., Chavoshi Borujeni, S., Barreto Munez, A., Noori, B. Alaghmand, S. Galindo, A., Didan, K.; Effect of Spatial Resolution of Satellite Images on Estimating the Greenness and Evapotranspiration of Urban Green Spaces, Hydrological Processes, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.13790
- Vulova, S., Meier, F., Fenner, D., Nouri, H., Kleinschmit, B. Summar nights in Berlin, Germany: Modelling air temperature spatially with crowd-sourced weather data, open-source geodata and machine learning. The IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (JSTARS), 2020
- Nouri, H., Chavoshi S., Hoekstra, A.Y. The blue water footprint of urban green spaces: An example for Adelaide, Australia, Landscape and Urban Planning, 2019, 190-103690
Conference contributions:
- Nouri, H., Chavoshi Borujeni, S., Nagler, P., Barreto Munez, A., Didan, K, Hoekstra, A. Changes in the water footprint of urban green spaces over time. European Geoscience Union – EGU 2021, In Water and scociety-HS5.1 “Session Advancing in water footprint/water productivity.” Vienna, Austria. April 19-30, 202170391. EGU 2021
- Nouri, H., Chavoshi Borujeni, S., Nagler, P., Barreto Munez, A., Didan, K, Spatio-temporal changes in water demand of urban greenery. European Geoscience Union – EGU 2021, In Hydrology-HS6 “Remote sensing and data assimilation, Session Remotely-sensed evapotranspiration.” Vienna, Austria. April 19-30, 2021. EGU 2021
- Berger, M., Campos, J., Carolli, M., Dantas, I., Kosatica, E., Kramer, A., Mikosch, N., Nouri, H., Schlattmann, A., Schmidt, F., Scomberg, A., Semmling, E., Advancing the water footprint productivity. European Geoscience Union – EGU 2021, In Water and scociety-HS5.1 “Session Advancing in water footprint/water productivity.” Vienna, Austria. April 19-30, 2021. EGU 2021
- Vulova, S., Meier, F., Rocha, A.D., Nouri, H., Kleinschmit, B. A data-driven approach to quantifying urban evapotranspiration using remote sensing, footprint modeling, and deep learning. European Geoscience Union – EGU 2021, In Hydrology-HS6 “Remote sensing and data assimilation, Session Remotely-sensed evapotranspiration.” Vienna, Austria. April 19-30, 2021. EGU 2021
- Nouri, H., Chavoshi Borujeni, S., Nagler, P., A.Y. Hoekstra, A.Y., Estimation of evapotranspiration, water demand and water footprint of urban green spaces using ground-based and optical remote sensing techniques, EcoSummit 2020 - Session 044: Providing Solutions to a Current Environmental Problem Facing our Changing World: Improving Methods and Models Used to Measure and Scale Evapotranspiration (ET) to the Landscape Scale in Urban Regions, Catchments and Wetlands, EcoSummit 2020 (postpone to 14-18 June 2021, Gold Coast, Australia)
- Nouri, H., Chavoshi Borujeni, S., Nagler, P., Barreto Munez, A., Didan, K.; The impact of local climate on the greenness and water demand of large urban green spaces, First International Conference on Urban Water Interfaces – UWI (22-24 September 2020, Berlin, Germany - online)
- Nouri, H., Nagler, P., Chavoshi Borujeni, S., Barreto Munez, A., Didan, K., Alaghmand, S., Galindo, A., Impact of the spatial resolution of satellite images on the evapotranspiration estimation of urban green spaces using optical remote sensing, American Geoscience Union - AGU 2019 (9-13 December, San Francisco, USA)
- Nouri, H., Nagler, P., Chavoshi Borujeni, S., Jarchow, C., Barreto Munez, A., Didan, K., Effects of spatial resolution of satellite images on the remote sensing-based evapotranspiration estimation of urban greenery, European Geoscience Union - EGU 2019 (8-13 April 2019, Vienna, Austria)