SaCANGO – Satellite based Canopy and Green Observation System

Urban green spaces and tree canopy cover are key elements of climate-resilient cities. With the EU Nature Restoration Regulation, cities and municipalities are for the first time required to monitor urban green spaces and tree canopy cover on a regular, comprehensive and standardised basis, including private areas.

Existing survey methods, such as tree inventories, are resource-intensive and often limited to public spaces. Freely available satellite data offer considerable potential; however, their spatial resolution is currently insufficient to capture small-scale urban vegetation structures.

The SaCANGO project addresses this challenge through the development of a satellite-based, AI-supported monitoring solution for urban green spaces and tree canopy cover.

The core methodological innovation is the Resolution Boosting approach developed by Fraunhofer Austria, which significantly enhances the effective spatial resolution of satellite imagery and enables detailed mapping of heterogeneous urban vegetation patterns. Supervised learning methods are trained on annotated datasets to ensure robust detection of green spaces across different urban contexts. The resulting data layers are visualised in a web-based GIS environment and complemented by analysis functions, in particular for temporal change detection.

In collaboration with the climate pioneer cities Graz and Gleisdorf, technical, functional and user-oriented requirements are defined and the potential for further applications is evaluated. Following validation in the pilot areas, SaCANGO establishes a scalable and standardisable methodology for urban green space monitoring in line with European regulatory requirements.