The SDR UK Imagery Data Service for Sustainability, Prosperity and Wellbeing (IMAGO)

Satellites and other airborne sensors create remarkable forms of smart data, with enormous untapped potential to transform research and policymaking across social science and health domains. Satellite imagery not only contains highly relevant information about places—how well off they are, how quickly they are developing and where, and available types of green, blue, and urban spaces—but also possesses other distinctive qualities. It is comprehensive and representative, with wide geographic coverage and regular updates, robust to many types of bias, and offers unique retrospective power, facilitating understanding of how a place is today, as well as how it has changed over previous years. At the same time, there is a critical dearth of data, where sustainability, prosperity, and wellbeing are concerned, especially for understanding and resolving persistent social and economic spatial inequalities, the impacts of environmental changes on people and places, and uneven outcomes in health and life expectancy. Satellite imagery offers a game-changing solution. However, given its technical complexity and requirements for specialist knowledge, to date it has mostly been leveraged by environmental scientists and engineers. IMAGO seeks a complete disruption of the status quo, proposing an SDR UK Data Service that transforms the usability, utility, and usage of satellite imagery that, in turn, revolutionises our understanding and resolution of urgent challenges facing the UK—especially where environmental vulnerability, urban development and housing, and health and wellbeing are concerned. IMAGO achieves its goal by meeting users where they are: translating complex imagery data into data products these stakeholders require through collaboration and co-production; delivering data via intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, as well as channels, formats, and approaches familiar to these communities; and expanding capacity and enthusiasm for using imagery-based data across a range of sectors, career stages, and disciplines. We adopt a highly innovative approach to achieve our vision, working across three principal aims. First: combining the development of novel computing and AI methods and stakeholder collaboration to co-develop automated workflows and data products at scale for custom-defined geographies and time periods (for example, quarterly counts of solar panel roofs for Newcastle postcodes, between 2015-2022). Second, data distribution channels that leverage the power of existing investments (e.g., Understanding Society, other SDR UK data services, NCEO's Data Hub, NERC Digital Solutions), alongside a user-friendly interface featuring interactive mapping, Large Language Model (LLM) powered data discovery and summarisation, and clear metadata and documentation. Third, high-visibility training and research activity, including in-house collaborative Beacon Research, to catalyse the adoption of satellite imagery for social science and health research and policymaking. Attention to ethics, public engagement, and continuous evaluation will underpin all IMAGO activities. Partnerships are key to delivering IMAGO, as barriers to imagery's uptake for research, policy, and practice in the social sciences and health are only partly resolved with data partnerships that enhance access. A second key limitation has been complexity and format of imagery data. To overcome this limitation and guarantee data are used, IMAGO works with data distribution partners, embedding linkage and flexibility. Third, bridging the gap between imagery's potential and actual usefulness, IMAGO works with application partners to establish data requirements, co-develop and promote data products, and collaborate on, and disseminate, impactful research and policy. IMAGO starts with an inaugural set of agreed partners, with an ambitious expansion plan as the data service grows.