Table 3 Examples of application of clustering methods towards SDGs using EO data

SDG 2 (Zero Hunger)

Agriculture

The proposed methodology based on K-Means and crop images, had a good performance estimating the rice yield

[51]

SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy)

Renewable energy sources

The choice of the clustering technique plays a crucial function in the forecasting of the gross wind power output

[74]

SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure)

Mining

The results showed that FCM was superior to K-Means and Self-Organising Map for mineral favourability mapping

[90]

SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities)

Land change

The proposed approach based on K-Means, demonstrated better detection accuracies and visual performance for land cover and land change detection, compared to several methods

[91]

Seismic

The method analysed was reliable and effective in the identification of sequences of earthquakes

[92]

Construction

The proposed method used to segment individual buildings had a good performance with datasets acquired from densely built-up areas

[76]

Land cover

The proposed clustering method outperformed the original approach for remote sensing segmentation in land cover classificatio

[93]

SDG 13 (Climate Action)

Wildfires

The presented algorithm for global burned area mapping was capable to adapt to different ecosystems and spatial resolution data

[54]

Geomorphology

The proposed DBSCAN methodology for geomorphological analysis allowed the detection of movements of a rock glacier

[94]

Climate

The techniques used such as K-Means and DBSCAN demonstrated their suitability for predicting climate types

[53]

SDG 14 (Life Below Water)

Sandbars

The proposed algorithm demonstrated a high potential to be used for the extraction of sandbars positions

[95]

SDG 15 (Life on Land)

Soil degradation

Assessment of spatial variability and mapping of soil properties provide an important link in identifying soil degradation spots

[96]

Agriculture

Optimised kernel-based FCM gave more accurate agriculture crop maps when compared with the classical FCM and K-Means

[97]

SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals)

Sustainability level

The results obtained using Hierarchical Cluster Analysis showed that Sweden has the highest level of sustainability among the European countries; while, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania were the countries with the lowest performance

[98]