Identifying Urban and Socio-Environmental Patterns of Brazilian Amazonian Cities by Remote Sensing and Machine Learning

Identifying urban patterns in the cities in the Brazilian Amazon can help to understand the impact of human actions on the environment, to protect local cultures, and secure the cultural heritage of the region. The objective of this study is to produce a classification of intra-urban patterns in Amazonian cities. Concretely, we produce a set of Urban and Socio-Environmental Patterns (USEPs) in the cities of Santarem and Cameta in Para, Brazilian Amazon. The contributions of this study are as follows: (1) we use a reproducible research framework based on remote sensing data and machine learning techniques; (2) we integrate spatial data from various sources into a cellular grid, separating the variables into environmental, urban morphological, and socioeconomic dimensions; (3) we generate variables specific to the Amazonian context; and (4) we validate these variables by means of a field visit to Cameta and comparison with patterns described in other works. Machine learning-based clustering is useful to identify seven urban patterns in Santarem and eight urban patterns in Cameta. The urban patterns are semantically explainable and are consistent with the existing scientific literature. The paper provides reproducible and open research that uses only open software and publicly available data sources, making the data product and code available for modification and further contributions to spatial data science analysis.

Automated summary

Identifying urban patterns in the cities in the Brazilian Amazon can help understand the impact of human actions on the environment, protect local cultures, and secure the cultural heritage of the region.