Jamal Jokar Arsanjani

Aalborg University · Department of Sustainability and Planning

Urbanization growth and climate change have increased the frequency and severity of floods in urban areas. One of the effective methods for reducing stormwater volume and managing urban floods is the low-impact development best management practice (LID-BMP). This study aims to mitigate flood volume and peak discharge caused by land use changes in t...

Urban micro-climate plays an important role in human activities and in ensuring public health. For instance, the urban heat island effect is crucial to the thermal comfort of citizens and tourists, similar to the urban cool island effect’s importance on human and infrastructure resilience. Approximately 35% of global big cities are located in dryla...

Site selection and allocation of manufacturing and processing facilities are essential to sustainable economic productivity of a given product while preserving soil, the environment, and biodiversity. An essential criterion when evaluating various approaches to model land suitability for pistachio processing facilities is their adaptability to acco...

Quantification of Surface Ecological Status (SES) changes is of great importance for understanding human exposure and adaptability to the environment. This study aims to assess the effect of urban growth on spatial and temporal changes of SES over a set of neighboring Iranian cities, Amol, Babol, Qaemshahr, and Sari, which are located in moderate a...

Spatial evaluation of urban environment quality (UEQ) is a key prerequisite in urban planning and development. The main goal of this study is to present a scenario-based spatial multi-criteria decision-making system for evaluating UEQ. Therefore, stakeholder involvement was conducted and eight environmental criteria and six spatial-functional crite...

The purpose of this study is to assess the vulnerability of urban blocks to earthquakes for Tehran as a city built on geological faults using an artificial neural network—multi-layer perceptron (ANN-MLP). Therefore, we first classified earthquake vulnerability evaluation criteria into three categories: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability capaci...

This study presents a novel risk-based decision support system for helping disaster risk management planners select the best locations for emergency shelters after an earthquake. The system starts by identifying 18 criteria, based on stakeholder analysis, that are important for selecting shelter sites. These criteria are then standardized to reflec...

Spatial evaluation of urban environment quality (UEQ) is a key prerequisite in urban planning and development. The main goal of this study is to present a scenario-based spatial multi-criteria decision-making system for evaluating UEQ. Therefore, stakeholder involvement was conducted and eight environmental criteria and six spatial-functional crite...

In remote sensing (RS), shadows play an important role, commonly affecting the quality of data recorded by remote sensors. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to detect and model the shadow effect in RS data as well as the information that is obtained from them, particularly when the data are to be used in further environmental studies. Shad...

COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on our society, environment and public health, in both positive and negative ways. The main aim of this study is to monitor the effect of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns on urban cooling. To do so, satellite images of Landsat 8 for Milan and Rome in Italy, and Wuhan in China were used to look at pre-lockdown and...

The aim of this study was to propose an approach for assessing the social resilience of citizens, using a locative multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model for an exemplary case study of Sarpol-e Zahab city, Iran. To do so, a set of 10 variables and 28 criteria affecting social resilience were used and their weights were measured using the Analy...

Preparedness against floods in a hazard management perspective plays a major role in the pre-event phase. Hence, assessing urban vulnerability and resilience towards floods for different risk scenarios is a prerequisite for urban planners and decision makers. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to propose the design and implementation of...

Recent research has shown promising results for estimating structural area, volume, and population from Sentinel 1 and 2 data at a 10 by 10‐m spatial resolution. These studies were, however, conducted in homogeneous countries in Northern Europe. This study presents a deep learning methodology for population estimation in areas geographically distin...

Mapping of landslides, conducted in 2021 by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), revealed 3202 landslides in Denmark, indicating that they might pose a bigger problem than previously acknowledged. Moreover, the changing climate is assumed to have an impact on landslide occurrences in the future. The aim of this study is to conduct...

Several global and regional efforts have been undertaken to map human-made settlements and their characteristics, including building material, area, volume, and population. However, given the unprecedented amount of Earth observation data and processing power available, there is a timely need for developing novel approaches for mapping these charac...

Shallow groundwater is a key resource for human activities and ecosystems, and is susceptible to alterations caused by climate change, causing negative socio-economic and environmental impacts, and increasing the need to predict the evolution of the water table. The main objective of this study is to gain insights about future water level changes b...

Anthropogenically-induced climate change is expected to be the contributing cause of sea level rise and severe storm events in the immediate future. While Danish authorities have downscaled the future oscillation of sea level rise across Danish coast lines in order to empower the coastal municipalities, there is a need to project the local cascadin...

Financial Inclusion is, in many ways, a spatial planning issue: Where do financial institutions provide services, how far do customers travel to access mobile money, which services are available where and how is agent cash-flow handled? Utilising geodata can contribute significantly to measuring financial access and thus assist in improving Financi...

Due to irregular and uncontrolled expansion of cities in developing countries, currently operational landfill sites cannot be used in the long-term, as people will be living in proximity to these sites and be exposed to unhygienic circumstances. Hence, this study aims at proposing an integrated approach for determining suitable locations for landfi...

The Covid-19 pandemic emerged and evolved so quickly that societies were not able to respond quickly enough, mainly due to the nature of the Covid-19 virus’ rate of spread and also the largely open societies that we live in. While we have been willingly moving towards open societies and reducing movement barriers, there is a need to be prepared for...

Due to irregular and uncontrolled expansion of cities in developing countries, currently operational landfill sites cannot be used in the long-term, as people will be living in proximity to these sites and be exposed to unhygienic circumstances. Hence, this study aims at proposing an integrated approach for determining suitable locations for landfi...

Mining activities and associated actions cause land-use/land-cover (LULC) changes across the world. The objective of this study were to evaluate the historical impacts of mining activities on surface biophysical characteristics, and for the first time, to predict the future changes in pattern of vegetation cover and land surface temperature (LST)....

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedent negative impacts on our society, however, evidences show a reduction of anthropogenic pressures on the environment. Due to the high importance of environmental conditions on human life quality, it is crucial to model the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on environmental conditions. Consequently, the objective...

This chapter discusses the broad and complex topic of data quality in citizen science – a contested arena because different projects and stakeholders aspire to different levels of data accuracy. In this chapter, we consider how we ensure the validity and reliability of data generated by citizen scientists and citizen science projects. We show that...

Recent studies have suggested that due to climate change, the number of wildfires across the globe have been increasing and continue to grow even more. The recent massive wildfires, which hit Australia during the 2019–2020 summer season, raised questions to what extent the risk of wildfires can be linked to various climate, environmental, topograph...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) plays a remarkable role in ocean surveillance, with capabilities of detecting oil spills, icebergs, and marine traffic both at daytime and at night, regardless of clouds and extreme weather conditions. The detection of ocean objects using SAR relies on well-established methods, mostly adaptive thresholding algorithms....

A set of factors cause the Surface Ecological Status (SES) of urban areas to become largely different from the surrounding rural areas. Hence, the degree of poorness of SES in urban areas versus surrounding rural areas forms a zone, which is named Urban Surface Ecological Poorness Zone (USEPZ). The main objective of this study was to propose a new...

Wildlife species’ habitats throughout North America are subject to direct and indirect consequences of climate change. Vulnerability assessments for the Intermountain West regard wildlife and vegetation and their disturbance as two key resource areas in terms of ecosystems when considering climate change issues. Despite the adaptability potential o...

The increase of Land Surface Temperature (LST) and the formation of heat island in megacities have become an emerging environmental concern. The main objective of this study is to predict the intensity of Tehran’s heat island in the year 2033 based on historical changes of land cover and LST. For this purpose, Landsat satellite images were integrat...

A harmful effect of anthropogenic activities in urban environments is the increases of thermal discomfort and subsequently, a negative effect on humans’ mental and physical performance. Therefore, it is of high importance to detect, monitor, and predict thermal discomfort, especially its temporal and spatial patterns in cities. The objective of thi...

Invasive plants are causing massive economic and environmental troubles for our societies worldwide. The aim of this study is to employ a set of machine learning classifiers for detecting invasive plant species using remote sensing data. The target species is Kudzu vine, which mostly grows in the south-eastern states of the US and quickly outcompet...

Wildfires are considered a devastating threat to natural ecosystems and human lives. Wildfires are complex phenomena, which depend on diverse factors including climatological factors, fuel availability and anthropogenic disturbance in many ways. The main objective of this study is (a) to identify the spatial autocorrelation of historical fire occur...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) presents a roadmap and a concerted platform of action towards achieving sustainable and inclusive development, leaving no one behind, while preventing environmental degradation and loss of natural resources. However, population growth, increased...

Self-harm has become one of the leading causes of mortality in developed countries. The overall rate for suicide in Canada is 11.3 per 100,000 according to Statistics Canada in 2015. Between 2000 and 2007 the lowest rates of suicide in Canada were in Ontario, one of the most urbanized regions in Canada. However, the interaction between land use, la...

Car parking is a challenging part of urban transportation and traffic violations cause many problems for citizens. Studies have shown that there is a direct relationship between vehicle parking violations and urban places. In this study, we investigated the spatial distribution of vehicle violations in a region of Tehran, Iran, that is suffering fr...

First responders and recovery planners need accurate and quickly derived information about the status of buildings as well as newly built ones to both help victims and to make decisions for reconstruction processes after a disaster. Deep learning and, in particular, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches have recently become state-of-t...

One of the most important environmental phenomena in urban environments is urban heat island, which plays a big role in understanding anthropogenic activities. The main objective of this study is to present a novel approach based on the differences of the biophysical characteristics between built-up and non-built-up land to model Surface Heat Islan...

As global warming is causing a significant reduction in the extent and the thickness of Arctic sea ice, a narrative for future large-scale commercial shipping in the Arctic has started to evolve. However, while most efforts have aimed to assess the financial benefits along with potential savings in greenhouse gas emissions, few studies have explore...

Car parking is a challenging part of urban transportation and the traffic violations around it cause many problems for citizens. In recent years, due to the fast growth and development of urbanization, temporary and unauthorized stopping of cars along the streets, especially in large cities, has led to an increased traffic, urban disorders, dangers...

Predictive modelling and its application in land change science has been considerably advanced, however, further performance improvement of the existing models is undergoing. CA-Markov is one of the frequently used methods for this purpose, while a few studies have investigated the possibility of improving it with respect to capturing heterogeneous...

One of the most important signs of decreasing quality of life in urban environments is the reduction of thermal comfort. Heat discomfort has a negative impact on physical and mental performance of humans. Hence, it is of outmost importance to monitor thermal comfort patterns in cities and study its effect on people. The main objective of this study...

Global land cover (LC) mapping has been the main source of monitoring our global landscapes for a wide range of applications e.g., food production estimation, urbanization, deforestation, climate change studies, air/soil/water pollution, and CO2 emission. Several initiatives and organizations have attempted to generate global LC maps using remote s...

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has proven to serve as a promising free global encyclopedia of maps with an increasing popularity across different user communities and research bodies. One of the unique characteristics of OSM has been the availability of the full history of users’ contributions, which can leverage our quality control mechanisms through exploit...

Global land cover maps are important sources of information for a wide range of studies including land change analysis and climate change research. While the global land cover maps attempt to present a consistent and homogenous data in terms of the production process, the existing datasets offer coarse resolution data, e.g. 1000 m for IGBP DISCover...

Wikimapia is a major privately-owned volunteered geographic information (VGI) project to collect information about places. Over the past ten years, Wikimapia has attracted hundreds of thousands of contributors and collected millions of data points, including towns, restaurants, lakes, and tourist attractions (http://wikimapia.org). Unlike OpenStree...

Land cover maps provide us with a unique opportunity to monitor our environmental and anthropogenic resources over space and time. Temporal land cover maps increase the efficiency of land monitoring process by providing a set of observations so that any changes in the landscape can be tracked. So far, many land change monitoring efforts have been l...

Urban informal settlements are growing rapidly, placing slum upgrading on the political agenda worldwide. This paper presents a survey on existing approaches integrating spatial data and slum upgrading. More precisely, it aims to explore the possibility of exploiting Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and Citizen Science (CS) as potential pra...

Cities throughout the world are expanding, and globally we are witnessing a significant amount of urbanisation. Currently, 54% of the world's population lives in cities, and an increase of 66% is expected by 2050. Based on the World Urbanisation Prospects' report, most of this growth is projected to concentrate in Asia and Africa. The resulting unc...

Uncertainty over the data quality of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is the largest barrier to the use of this data source by National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) and other government bodies. A considerable body of literature exists that has examined the quality of VGI as well as proposed methods for quality assessment. The purpose of this cha...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has become a rich and well established source of geospatial data. From the popular OpenStreetMap (OSM) to many citizen science projects and social network platforms, the amount of geographically referenced information that is constantly being generated by citizens is burgeoning. The main issue that continues...

Sustainable management of urban regions in coastal areas has become vital particularly in developing countries. Uncontrolled urban sprawl has the potential to be detrimental to coastal regions, irreversibly damaging vulnerable and valuable natural landscapes. This paper analyzes spatiotemporal trends in urban development of four municipalities in G...

This editorial presents an introduction to fourteen papers published in the Special Issue of Earth Observation and Geoinformation Technologies for Sustainable Development in the Sustainability journal.[...]

Remote sensing, as well as the recent advancements of crowd sensing, along with novel and recent geospatial technologies, have great potential to explore and understand the relationships between our surroundings—in particular our urban and rural environments and natural spaces—and public health through environmental factors [1,2].[...]

The impact of natural hazards on mankind has increased dramatically over the past decades. Global urbanization processes and increasing spatial concentrations of exposed elements induce natural hazard risk at a uniquely high level. To mitigate affiliated perils requires detailed knowledge about elements at risk. Considering a high spatiotemporal va...

Remote sensing, as well as the recent advancements of crowd sensing, along with novel and recent geospatial technologies, have great potential to explore and understand the relationships between our surroundings—in particular our urban and rural environments and natural spaces—and public health through environmental factors [1,2]. Emerging phenomen...

An increasing number of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and social media platforms have been continuously growing in size, which have provided massive georeferenced data in many forms including textual information, photographs, and geoinformation. These georeferenced data have either been actively contributed (e.g., adding data to OpenStre...

Agricultural changes are complex and managing an appropriate type of crop change to satisfy stakeholders with various interests is challenging. Decisions regarding a crop change need to be debated among multiple stakeholders with various conflicting viewpoints. Two kinds of conflicts might occur as a result of crop change in an agricultural landsca...

Agricultural changes are complex and managing an appropriate type of crop change to satisfy stakeholders with various interests is challenging. Decisions regarding a crop change need to be debated among multiple stakeholders with various conflicting viewpoints. Two kinds of conflicts might occur as a result of crop change in an agricultural landsca...

Land-related inventories are important sources of geoinformation for environ-mentalists, researchers, policy-makers, practitioners, and ecologists. Traditionally , a considerable amount of energy, time, and money have been dedicated to map global/regional/local land use datasets. While remote sensing images and techniques along with field surveying...

Land change modelers often create future maps using reference land use map. However, future land use maps may mislead decision-makers, who are often unaware of the sensitivity and the uncertainty in land use maps due to error in data. Since most metrics that communicate uncertainty require using reference land use data to calculate accuracy, the as...

Agricultural changes are complex and managing an appropriate type of crop change to satisfy stakeholders with various interests is challenging. Decisions regarding a crop change need to be debated among multiple stakeholders with various conflicting viewpoints. Two kinds of conflicts might occur as a result of crop change in an agricultural landsca...

Geo-tagged photographs are used increasingly as a source of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which could potentially be used for land use and land cover applications. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the feasibility of using this source of spatial information for three use cases related to land cover: Calibration, validation and ver...

Global land cover (LC) maps have been widely employed as the base layer for a number of applications including climate change, food security, water quality, biodiversity, change detection, and environmental planning. Due to the importance of LC, there is a pressing need to increase the temporal and spatial resolution of global LC maps. A recent adv...

Agricultural land use is increasingly changing due to different anthropogenic activities. A combination of economic, socio-political, and cultural factors exerts a direct impact on agricultural changes. This study aims to illustrate how stakeholders and policymakers can take advantage of a web-based spatial decision support system (SDSS), namely Sm...

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has seen an exponential increase in the last few years and large volumes of geodata have been received from volunteered individuals. The collected geodata are heterogeneous in terms of different dimensions such as spatial patterns of contributions, quality, patterns of contributing individuals, and type of contributions. Because...

Cities are under continuous pressure due to an increasing urbanization which will have far-reaching consequences for housing, transportation, retail, etc. To cope with these challenges, methodological advances in quantitative modeling coupled with growing amounts of spatial and spatiotemporal data can add significantly to our understanding of how c...

Recent developments of geospatial technologies and models have provided environmentalists and naturalists with a wide variety of facilities and approaches for improved monitoring and management of environmental resources. Rich temporal remote sensing datasets, e.g., Landsat imagery as well as geospatial modeling techniques, facilitate the process o...

There is no doubt that data is of paramount importance to scientific progress. With the enormous development of science and technology, a huge amount of data fragments is produced every day. [...]

Toronto’s Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) has faced on-going challenges concerning its demographic shifts in the urban and rural fringe tending to become a megacity over the coming decades, due to rapid population increase and urban amalgamation. For this research we examine past urban land use transitions in Toronto’s CMA based on collected remote...

OpenStreetMap (OSM) represents one of the most well-known examples of a collaborative mapping project. Major research efforts have so far dealt with data quality analysis but the modality of OSM's evolution across space and time has barely been noted. This study aims to analyze spatio-temporal patterns of contributions in OSM by proposing a contrib...

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