Karachi Futures is a research initiative + tech shop aiming to understand the social and economic problems of Karachi in a much more deeper quantitative and qualitative sense. Our role is to research factors that may influence the future of Karachi, with the purposeof enabling a much smarter, digital enabled and overall better city – ready to leapfrog into the 4th Industrial Revolution.
The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is a simple graphical indicator that can be used to analyze remote sensing measurements, often from a space platform, assessing whether or not the target being observed contains live green vegetation.
For this experiment, we take LANDSAT8 images from February 2019 and calculate and aggregate NDVI values for different parts of Karachi. All data and technology used for this experiment in open source.
We calculate the NDVI value of each pixel between 0 and 1, where 1 is the highest level of live green vegetation. For this experiment,
we have kept the threshold for classifying a pixel as green at 0.0982 as per this research paper by the Departent of Geography at the University of Punjab published in 2016.
You access the working prototype here; please consider that it is still very much in wip