Nose Hill Park, Calgary
Median composite of Sentinel-2 imagery (mid-May to mid-September 2025).
Band combination: 12-8-3, emphasizing substrate contrasts, vegetation structure, and moisture patterns.

#RemoteSensing #EarthObservation #Sentinel2 #OpenData #GIS #QGIS #GeoDataArt #GeoSpectralArt #Calgary #Alberta #UrbanEcology #GeospatialAnalysis #Canada #GreennessOfCalgary #Copernicus #CopernicusSentinel #NoseHillPark

🌿 Greenness of Calgary Communities (Summer 2024)
📎 https://www.datastory.org.ua/greenness-of-calgary-communities-summer-2024/

Last year I published my first attempt to analyze the actual vegetation condition across Calgary and to build a data-driven ranking of its communities based on median summer NDVI. It was my very first experiment in assessing urban greenness at the neighbourhood scale — but the results turned out surprisingly insightful.
Some patterns were expected, while others revealed unexpectedly low vegetation density in places that looked green from the ground.

This exploration later grew into a much larger line of research on Calgary’s greenness, climate resilience, and spatial variability in vegetation health. You can find some results here with thematic hashtag #GreennessOfCalgary

If you're working on urban ecology, remote sensing, or land-cover analysis of Canadian cities — I’d be happy to exchange ideas.

#NDVI #RemoteSensing #Calgary #UrbanEcology #Sentinel2 #QGIS #RStats #Alberta #Canada #EnvironmentalMonitoring #GeospatialAnalysis

🗺️ Making atlases better, one version at a time

Not everything works perfectly on the first try — sometimes the most obvious design ideas come late and suddenly! 🤣

Here’s one example: showing community boundaries so that people unfamiliar with cartography can at least find their own street.

In the second version (right), I added a subtle shading effect that keeps the map’s analytical context but visually highlights the selected community.

Each atlas is generated automatically in QGIS Report Designer — one atlas per city sector, with multiple communities.
That means this improvement wasn’t just “drawing a border manually,” but rather a data-driven programming and sorting task integrated into the atlas workflow.

🟩 Left: earlier version
🟩 Right: current improved version

#QGIS #Cartography #DataVisualization #UrbanMapping #GIScience #OpenData #GeospatialAnalysis #Calgary #Automation #AtlasDesign #Rstats #RemoteSensing #Copernicus #Sentinel2 #GreennessOfCalgary #UrbanEcology #OpenStreetMap #Alberta #Canada

🌊 Modeling a potential dam breach — and how panic spread beyond the real watershed

This project assessed the potential consequences of a dam failure at a mine-water impoundment in the Svystunova Gully.

🔹 Reconstructed the original pre-impoundment terrain from archival topographic maps.
🔹 Used Sentinel-based land-cover classification to assign variable Manning’s roughness coefficients.
🔹 Built a modern DEM including the dam structure and current flooded zone.
🔹 Simulated dam-break flood dynamics in GRASS GIS — frame by frame.
🔹 Produced a video visualization to help local communities understand real risks (and ignore fake ones).
🔹 The results were later featured in regional media and used in discussions about mine-water safety.

🎥 Watch the short video visualization:
🔗 https://youtu.be/JTcCLXqvWlE?si=NS7ly7UAZu1XttWy

#Hydrology #DamSafety #GIS #GRASSGIS #MineWater #HydrodynamicModeling #GeospatialAnalysis #EnvironmentalRisk #OpenScience #IndependentResearch #SvystunovaGully

🌳 Random Forests and Living Trees

English translation of my earlier article on applying satellite imagery and machine learning to map urban land cover.

What started as a local research project in Kryvyi Rih turned into something much larger — the results sparked a heated discussion among residents, officials, and industry representatives about the real condition of green buffers around large industrial sites.

The methodology developed during that work is still being used today — adapted for new environmental and urban projects.

🔗 https://www.datastory.org.ua/random-forests-and-living-trees/

#RemoteSensing #MachineLearning #LandCoverMapping #UrbanEcology #EnvironmentalMonitoring #RandomForest #GeospatialAnalysis #GIS #RStats #SAGAGIS #QGIS #IndependentResearch #OpenSource #EnvironmentalDataScience #KryvyiRih #LULC

🌿 NDVI change in Calgary’s Weaselhead Flats (2024 → 2025)

This map shows how vegetation in one of Calgary’s most diverse natural areas responded to the city’s unusually wet summer of 2025.
Greener shades mark zones where NDVI increased most strongly compared to 2024 — the same floodplain and forest patches that locals know for dense canopy recovery.

Even modest year-to-year shifts in temperature and rainfall leave clear spatial traces in NDVI — a reminder of how sensitive urban ecosystems are to climate variability, and how well open-data satellite products can capture it.

🛰 Data and processing: Sentinel-2 + R + QGIS

#NDVI #RemoteSensing #Calgary #UrbanEcology #ClimateImpact #EnvironmentalMonitoring #GIS #QGIS #RStats #DataVisualization #GeospatialAnalysis #Sentinel2 #CopernicusSentinel2 #CopernicusProgram #Copernicus #GreennessOfCalgary #Alberta #Canada

🌿 Calgary’s vegetation — satellite comparison (2024 → 2025)

Median NDVI maps from mid-May to mid-September show a clear difference between the two seasons.

In 2025, NDVI values are noticeably higher — vegetation stayed greener and denser for longer.
The wetter summer had a strong effect on canopy productivity across most Calgary communities, especially in parkland and tree-covered zones.

🛰️ Based on Sentinel-2 imagery and R + QGIS processing.

#RemoteSensing #NDVI #UrbanEcology #Calgary #GeospatialAnalysis #GIS #Sentinel2 #EnvironmentalData #DataVisualization #OpenScience #EarthObservation #ClimateImpact #RStats #QGIS