Inner City Problem-Inner City Solution: Remote Sensing, A Critical Tool for Empowering Underserved Communities

Inner City communities have traditionally been overlooked and often forgotten in the satellite and ground-based remote sensing revolution. For too long, undergraduate minority students from these communities have been marginalized, ostracized, and unprepared to participate in the plethora of remote sensing applications that yet remain new, foreign, and mysterious. Even basic understanding of the amazing tool of remote sensing is unknown to them. These students lack the exposure, the awareness, the understanding, and the engagement in the foray of remote sensing and the unique lens it provides to probe and unearth new ways of gaining knowledge about the environment. To adequately prepare inner-city students to become members of the next generation of geoscientists, to empower and sustain underserved neighborhoods, and to assist in replenishing the geoscience workforce, unique paradigms of teaching and learning about remote sensing are needed.At the Center for Remote Sensing and Earth System Sciences (ReSESS) at the New York City College of Technology (City Tech), remote sensing is being used as a catalyst to attract and to engage students from underserved communities in studying urban climate within their local neighborhoods. Results indicate that this approach of using remote sensing to attract students to urban climate increased awareness and understanding in the geosciences, and it motivated students to share their newfound knowledge in environmental sustainability initiatives with their fellow local citizens.