What advantages does the USAGE project bring to the Municipality of Ferrara?

The USAGE project has represented a great opportunity to acquire high-value data that are extremely useful for many technical departments inside the municipality. Hyperspectral images, satellite images, thermal images from sensors, point clouds from Lidar sensors are just some of the “raw” data acquired.  

Another positive aspect is that thanks to the collaboration of valuable technical project partners such as AVT Italia, DEDA Next, Epsilon Italia and Fondazione Bruno Kessler, MOF have learned innovative methods to approach data collection, cataloging and processing with particular reference to remote sensing data.

Furthermore, we cannot overlook the strong push that the project has given to data sharing activities between public, private bodies and private companies thanks to the creation of the urban data space which aims to spread the culture of interoperability and overcome the traditional technological and trust barriers that prevent the circulation of information in a continuous and secure way.

How do you think the project  can be useful to citizens?

The datasets acquired and created within the project have been published on the open data platform (https://dati.comune.fe.it) and made available to all citizens, companies, public and private entities with an open license (CC-BY 4.0) and can be used by anyone freely even for commercial purposes.

Starting from the raw data, analytical data were created that describe the territory in detail (i.e. surface materials, DTM, DSM) but also indicators and summary data, the so-called Decision Ready Information (DRI) fundamental for the knowledge and monitoring of the territory and to guide political choices related to the issues of heat islands, flooding from extreme events and biodiversity.

Furthermore, the project had from the beginning a strong component linked to citizen science and to raising awareness among citizens towards the use cases of the project. Several public initiatives have been promoted to train science volunteers who have shown great commitment in detecting environmental parameters (temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.) with the help of Meteotracker; map floods due to heavy rainfall with the QField app; collect information about biodiversity often within projects promoted by the Natural History Museum of Ferrara using the iNaturalist app (https://www.citizenscienceferrara.org/)

What do you think the effects of USAGE could be in a few years?

The project ends at the end of July this year (2025). What I imagine now is that in the next few years there will be an increase in the number of subjects who will join the urban data space also thanks to the participation of voluntary associations. But above all there will be a notable improvement in compliance with the FAIR principles and more and more data will be exchanged in a standard and interoperable way.