The Earth Observation for Official Statistics and policy indicators reporting Conference https://stateo26.esa.int/ has taken place from 05 to 07 May 2026 in ESRIN. The event facilitates the integration EO into national statistics and other official data supporting policy needs, addressing how EO data can enhance the accuracy, timeliness, and spatial granularity of key metrics. The aim is to accelerate the way EO can effectively enable the policy implementation and the simplification of transversal reporting.

We have contributed to this conference with a poster titled “The tolerance of spatial statistics for methodological or conceptual ambiguities– exemplified by the degree of urbanization in Germany“. The poster was presented by Anica Huck from our partner European Space Imaging (EUSI) on behalf of the project team from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), the Federal Institute for Population Research (BIB) and our Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.

Differences between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas in terms of population development have so far been mapped on the basis of administrative units. However, administrative units often integrate heterogeneous built and demographic densities within their territory, so that a clear binary classification is challenging and statistics get distorted through aggregation. Our research work showcased the delineation of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ at higher spatial resolution not in a binary manner, but in a continuous way independent of admin units based on a data-driven approach using Earth observation and other geospatial data. Our empirical results reveal the degree of urbanization in Germany is between certainly 50.0% up to possibly 68.1% of the population. This means that the degree of urbanization in Germany is, lower than presented by other statistics.

For further reading please see here:

• To be, or not to be ‘urban’? A multi-modal method for the differentiated measurement of the degree of urbanization https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0198971522000746
• Eine Differenzierung der Stadt-Land Dichotomie: ein wahrscheinlichkeitsbasierter Ansatz https://elib.dlr.de/195853/1/bbsr-online-18-2023_Taubenb%C3%B6ck%20et%20al.pdf
• Is Germany experiencing suburbanization or metropolitan growth? Contrasting different approaches to trace suburbanization trends at a fine spatial scale  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143622825002747
• Nationwide classification of settlements types using expert knowledge, remote sensing, and open data https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11076045
• Categorizing urban areas into “core”, “fringe” and “periphery” based on the built-up morphology https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10144133