![](bg8.png)
same pattern is seen as with the data from the official
surface stations. Separating the data as weekly sets
(Monday to Sunday), predominantly, the day with
the highest NO
2
concentration occurs on workdays
and the days with the lowest concentrations occur on
weekends or holidays. Figure 9 shows a comparison
between two images from the S5p satellite, Figure 9a
from a workday and Figure 9b from a weekend day of
the same week. In the comparison presented in Fig-
ure 9, it is easy to see that, in the same week, the con-
centration of NO
2
changes significantly according to
the activities carried out by the majority of the city’s
inhabitants.
4.4 Joint Discussion
This study highlights the poor quality of green infras-
tructure and air quality in three districts of Barcelona.
This may be because squares and streets are designed
for humans and vehicles rather than for biodiversity
and health. In fact, considerably better results have
been obtained for human daily quality of life than for
biodiversity and health. Regarding street usages, the
ones with more traffic (Eixample) are the ones pol-
luted and with less biodiversity.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The proposed joint approach enable us to detect
hotspots where transformations to enhance biodiver-
sity, people’s quality of daily life as a whole and
health are needed. Regarding the biodiversity and
urban life methodologies the indices generated are a
promising tool, specially for urban planning in this
sustainability context. Next steps on this area will be
to compare the results with citizens perceptions and to
improve indices calculations taking into account this
issue. Regarding the air quality proposed methodol-
ogy, it is important to note that the way we use Sen-
tinel data is not the most suitable for a complete anal-
ysis of air quality data from satellites. However, when
considering the processing time and the volume that
these data can reach, it is a recommendable methodol-
ogy for initial analysis, for more visual than quantita-
tive representations and to easily and accurately filter
the images that can be used in the study. Concerning
the location of air measurement stations, this model
does not allow to evaluate the air quality in different
streets of a neighborhood, a useful assessment to de-
termine, for example, how the implementation of a
pedestrian street reduces the emission of pollutants in
this Street.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study was co-funded by the Barcelona City
Council’s “Fons COVID” scientific research awards
given to Mariona Ferrandiz-Rovira and AGAUR,
Generalitat de Catalunya, through the Consolidated
Research Group “Geomatics” (Ref: 2021-SGR-
00536). We warmly thank Jordi Noya and Dani
Rodr
´
ıguez for their fieldwork and processing data as
well as Laia Llonch, Marc Deu and Cristina Terraza
for their helpful discussions about the project.
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