#greennessofcalgary — Public Fediverse posts

Based on satellite imagery from June to August 2025, my research revealed 58,673 distinct vegetative patches across Calgary, covering a total of 39,009 hectares. However, exactly 50% of the city's total green cover is concentrated in just 44 large megaclusters. The remaining half is dispersed across tens of thousands of tiny, highly fragmented patches.

UPD:
Previous steps of my research you can find here:
https://www.datastory.org.ua/

#GIS #RemoteSensing #EarthObservation #Calgary #SpatialDataScience #MachineLearning #Geoscience #OpenData #GreennessOfCalgary #UrbanResilience #fossgiss #RStats #Alberta #Canada

🔥 Calgary Urban Heat: How the Solid-to-Tree Ratio drives an 8°C gap

My Summer 2025 ML satellite analysis reveals a direct relationship between a community's built-to-canopy footprint and surface temperature (LST):

🌳 Cooling Refuges (~29.5–31°C): Roxboro, Rideau Park, Discovery Ridge, Eau Claire (mature canopies + river valleys).
🔥 Northeast Heat Dome (~37–38°C): Marlborough, Rundle, Temple (dense low-rise footprint, minimal mature canopy).
🏗️ New Suburbs: Seton, Redstone, Rangeview (canopy lag: fully built out, but young saplings need years to mature).

🌲 Urban trees are not decorative landscaping — they are critical municipal climate infrastructure.

#GIS #RemoteSensing #YYC #EarthObservation #Calgary #SpatialDataScience #LandCover #MachineLearning #Geoscience #GreennessOfCalgary #Rstats #UrbanTrees #TreeCanopy #UrbanHealth

🔥 The Green Illusion: Why Zoning-Level Analysis Changes the Picture

📊 Gross community statistics can be misleading. When measuring an entire neighborhood, large municipal parks and green buffers inflate the overall 'greenness' score.

❗ When we filter the data down exclusively to actual Residential Land Use Districts in established communities, the picture changes significant:
🔹 Unvegetated/Impervious surfaces (Solid) explode to ~80% (79.22%) of the total zoned area.
🔹 Vegetative classes collapse: Functional lawns and canopy cover are compressed into narrow margins (Lawn: 2.15%, Forest: 0.59%), with community-level sparsed trees (Park) accounting for only 17.87%.

☝️ Moving from macro-boundaries to parcel-level zoning exposes the true physical density of Calgary’s residential footprint.

#GIS #RemoteSensing #EarthObservation #Calgary #SpatialDataScience #LandCover #MachineLearning #Geoscience #GreennessOfCalgary #Rstats #YYC #DataScience #Urban #Sentinel

How does physical vegetation compare to administrative park maps?

In a new article by LiveWire Calgary, I shared technical insights from my 10-meter machine learning land cover classification model.

🛰️ Satellites map physical ground reality, not property boundaries. Multispectral land cover data reveals continuous fine fuel pathways (grass, brush, and canopy) extending across unmanaged ravines and private lots right up to residential property lines at Calgary's Wildland-Urban Interface.

🔗 Read the full article: https://livewirecalgary.com/2026/08/06/calgary-wildfire-campaign-high-risk-areas-map-gaps/

#GIS #RemoteSensing #EarthObservation #Calgary #SpatialDataScience #LandCover #WUI #MachineLearning #Geoscience #GreennessOfCalgary #LiveWireCalgary

📉 Comparing the Solid-to-Tree Ratio with the Land Surface Temperature (LST) data obtained in the previous phase of the study allows for a visual assessment of the relationship between surface sealing and summer surface heating across Calgary’s residential communities.
🔥 The plot reveals a strong pattern for the vast majority of communities: a sharp increase in temperature occurs within the ratio range of 0 to 5. The Downtown Commercial Core stands out as a distinct outlier, where low LST values are driven by deep geometric shading from high-rise buildings. Additionally, neighborhoods such as Manchester, Seton, Redstone, Beltline, and Rangeview, among a few others, slightly diverge from the main trend.
📊 Full methodology and additional charts via the link:👇
https://www.datastory.org.ua/calgarys-microclimatic-anatomy-what-lies-beneath-the-citys-green-appearance/

#Calgary #OpenData #UrbanHeat #DataScience #ClimateResilience #YYC #Geoscience #CityPlanning #RemoteSensing #RStats #MachineLearning #GreennessOfCalgary

🔥 It looks like it's time to lock in the current version of the machine learning model (LULC v.6.0). Validation results on an independent test dataset (Confusion Matrix) demonstrate the excellent predictive power of the algorithm:
🔹 Overall Accuracy: 98.29% (95% CI: 98.16% – 98.41%) with a No Information Rate = 60.28% (p-value < 2.2e-16).
🔹 Cohen’s Kappa: 0.9691, confirming high classification reliability even with severe class imbalance.
The model shows a very low error rate for non-vegetated areas (Solid, Balanced Accuracy 99.72%) and water bodies (Water, 99.75%), but expectedly faces challenges at the boundaries between the Lawn (open grass) and Park (sparse trees) classes.
Currently, I am moving on to an advanced analysis of the drivers shaping Urban Heat Islands (UHI) in Calgary and preparing a publication for my website. Stay tuned for updates!
#Calgary #OpenData #UrbanHeat #DataScience #ClimateResilience #YYC #Geoscience #CityPlanning #RemoteSensing #RStats #MachineLearning #GreennessOfCalgary

Saturday Data Dive: Mapping Calgary’s Thermal Fingerprint 🛰️📊

Spent some quality time with GEE, R and Landsat-8/9 data today.

I’ve just finished processing a Median Land Surface Temperature (LST) model for Calgary, covering the entire Summer of 2025. This isn't just a single-day snapshot—it’s a robust composite of many satellite scenes, filtered to show the true intra-urban thermal zones.

Quick Takeaways:
🔹 Surface temperature in some busines area and "heat traps" peaked at over 51.3°C.
🔹 The contrast between our "Cool Islands" and "Extreme Heat Zones" is striking.
🔹 This automated workflow in R allows for a granular look at urban climate resilience that standard reports often miss.

I’m currently finalizing a full breakdown and a community-by-community analysis.
Stay tuned—the detailed article is coming soon!

#Calgary #DataScience #UrbanHeatIsland #RemoteSensing #ClimateResilience #Landsat #RStats #GIS #Sustainability #GEE #EnvironmentalData #Summer2025 #YYC #GreennessOfCalgary #Alberta #Canada