abstract
| - Rapid urbanization has brought economic prosperity, realized social progress, and created modern civilization. However, it has also dramatically changed the urban environment and created a series of problems, such as air pollution, water resource shortages, loss of biodiversity, and so on. Therefore, how to effectively monitor the spatio-temporal environmental changes becomes a key issue in urban sustainable development. Conventional monitoring methods cannot properly reflect the urban environmental changes because of the long experiment period and high investment involved. Remote sensing technology allows for quickly obtaining accurate, real-time, dynamic environmental information at a large-scale. Thus it has been increasingly used for a vast range of applications in urban studies. This study will summarize the features and basis of remote sensing, and exemplify its applications in urban environmental issues, including urban water, air, vegetation density, land cover, urban heat island effect, urban transportation, and disaster warning. In the future, access to the remote sensing technology for decision makers will be particularly important when carrying out regulations and policies on urban and regional sustainable development.
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