摘要：But poverty and other societal characteristics also hold a spatial dimension. Poverty can often be identified visually and reflected in the density of residential structures, patters of roads, the material of roofs or the distribution and extent of green spaces. Many of these features are observable from space. From the perspective of social science, capturing this data may provide meaningful information about the context that shapes social phenomena (Council and Stern, 1988). There are more than 1400 satellites continuously collecting an unprecedented amount of data from Earth at ever-improving spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions, over increasingly short time intervals. Data col- lected by these satellites and other sensors are progressively shifting the way we measure and understand our world. These data allow re- searchers to study and map the physical environment and infer about social processes in near real time, in almost every corner of the world.
