IGARSS 2021 High School Program Green in the City [Education]

Supported 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-year-old 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 intra-urban 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.