Francisco Rowe, Martina Pardy and Shaonlee Patranabis will be presenting at the Digital Footprints Conference 2026.

Abstract

Satellites capture detailed and comprehensive data of the Earth. From urban development to green spaces to pollution, this imagery can help us address the UK’s most complex challenges in wellbeing, prosperity and sustainability. However, extracting actionable insights from raw imagery can be overwhelming and out of reach for non-specialists.

Our talk will cover the different data products that Imago has launched to help make satellite imagery more useful, usable and used across social science research and policy. These tools will help policymakers and researchers make more informed decisions and conclusions, whether through measurement of sunlight exposure across the UK, characterisation of environmental risk at local scale, or better understanding of green and built environments.

Speakers

Francisco Rowe

Francisco Rowe is a Professor in Population Data Science; the Lead of the Geographic Data Science Lab at the University of Liverpool; and Co-Vice Chair of the Mobile Phone Data Task Team (MPD-TT) at the UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics (UN-CEBD). He leads the UN-CEBD Migration Sub-group. He is the Chair of the Quantitative Research Methods Group of the Royal Geographical Society; Co-investigator of the UK Smart Data Service for Imagery (Imago); and, Co-Deputy Director of the MRC-funded Social Health Hub. His research focuses on human mobility and migration; geographic data science; and climate sustainability.

With this work, he seeks to advance our understanding of the causes and impacts of human movements for communities and individuals through the novel application of geographic data science methodologies and digitally collected data. His work focuses on changes to human mobility patterns during disasters, including climate, health hazards and conflict, and how urban form shapes mobility patterns and impacts climate, with a strong policy focus. He works closely with various sections of the UN, including the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the International Organization for Migration, Displacement Tracking Matrix and the Statistics Division. He has published 100+ scientific articles and works closely with the UN. He serves multiple journal editorial boards and was until recently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the European Regional Science Association.

Martina Pardy

Martina is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Geographic Data Science Lab, University of Liverpool, and the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics. Within Imago, she works on the CLiVE (Climate Local Vulnerability and Exposure) and RGB (Resources in Green and Built Environments) data products to assess the economic and distributional consequences of environmental hazards at urban and regional scales, using satellite imagery, mobile phone data, causal inference and machine learning.

Shaonlee Patranabis

Shaonlee is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Imago, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool. Her research brings together spatial data analysis and questions about how environments and institutions shape social and economic outcomes. At Imago, she works with satellite-derived environmental data to understand how satellite data can be leveraged to support social sciences and policy research across the UK. She is particularly excited about translating these methods and data infrastructure for cities and regions in the Global South, where satellite data can help address questions about equity and development in the face of data gaps.

Shaonlee recently completed her PhD at the LSE's Department of Geography and Environment, where she was part of the Economic Geography Cluster. Her thesis examined how institutional arrangements—from colonial opium trade networks to contemporary mortgage markets—shape persistent patterns of spatial inequality and urban development in India.

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