IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2021 - 289

EDUCATION
FRANK CANTERS AND FRIEKE VAN COILLIE
IGARSS 2021 High School Program
Green in the City
S
upported by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Society (GRSS) High School and Undergrad
Student Outreach Program (HSUSO), the educational
chairs of the 2021 IEEE International Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS 2021 developed a
remote sensing school project targeting 16- and 17-yearold
pupils in the third grade of secondary education in
Flanders, Belgium. HSUSO was led by Dr. Linda Bailey
Hayden and Dr. Josée Lévesque. The Green in the City
project focused on the role of urban green in cities. Using
dedicated course materials, including knowledge
clips, manuals and tutorials, and data sets for several
Belgian cities, the project offered hands-on training
in basic remote sensing and geographic information
system (GIS) skills. By exploring spectral reflectance
properties of different materials, participating students
learned how to map urban green from satellite data and
analyze the relation between urban green and other environmental
and socioeconomic variables at the intraurban
scale. The project reached more than 500 students
from 20 schools. Given the success of the project, plans
to roll out an international version of the program are
in the pipeline.
BACKGROUND
In 2014-2015, three Belgian universities (VUB, UGent,
KULeuven) launched the Geomobiel (Geomobile) project.
Over a period of one and a half years, more than
5,000 pupils in the third grade of secondary education
in Flanders and Brussels were introduced to the basics
of surveying, remote sensing, and GIS through a series
of workshops organized on site in the more than
100 schools that participated in the project. Geomobiel
turned out to become such a success that in 2019,
when preparations for IGARSS 2021 started, the idea
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2021.3126597
Date of current version: 14 January 2022
DECEMBER 2021 IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE
FIGURE 1. A teacher instructing pupils.
came up to recycle the remote sensing component of
Geomobiel and use it as a basis for developing a new
educational project that would focus on sharpening
student's geospatial research skills. The main idea
was to introduce students to basic remote sensing
concepts through hands-on tutorials and train them
in using geospatial tools to independently perform
research on important environmental themes related
to urban green, quality of life and sustainability. (See
Figures 1-3.)
TUTORIALS
With the support of the IEEE GRSS HSUSO, a set of tutorials
was developed consisting of three main modules.
Module 1 focuses on how to produce an urban
vegetation map from medium-resolution multispectral
imagery. Students are made familiar with the
characteristics of multiresolution satellite imagery
by examining spectral reflectance curves for different
types of urban land cover. Applying this knowledge,
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IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2021

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