Outlining where humans live, the World Settlement Footprint 2015

• Published in: Scientific data Vol. 7; no. 1; p. 242
• Main Authors: Marconcini, Mattia, Metz-Marconcini, Annekatrin, Üreyen, Soner, Palacios-Lopez, Daniela, Hanke, Wiebke, Bachofer, Felix, Zeidler, Julian, Esch, Thomas, Gorelick, Noel, Kakarla, Ashwin, Paganini, Marc, Strano, Emanuele
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 20.07.2020; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 704/172; 706/134; 706/2808; Data Descriptor; Earth; Human settlements; Humanities and Social Sciences; Land settlement; Learning algorithms; Machine learning; multidisciplinary; Photointerpretation; Population distribution; Risk assessment; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2052-4463; 2052-4463
• DOI: 10.1038/s41597-020-00580-5

Human settlements are the cause and consequence of most environmental and societal changes on Earth; however, their location and extent is still under debate. We provide here a new 10 m resolution (0.32 arc sec) global map of human settlements on Earth for the year 2015, namely the World Settlement Footprint 2015 (WSF2015). The raster dataset has been generated by means of an advanced classification system which, for the first time, jointly exploits open-and-free optical and radar satellite imagery. The WSF2015 has been validated against 900,000 samples labelled by crowdsourcing photointerpretation of very high resolution Google Earth imagery and outperforms all other similar existing layers; in particular, it considerably improves the detection of very small settlements in rural regions and better outlines scattered suburban areas. The dataset can be used at any scale of observation in support to all applications requiring detailed and accurate information on human presence (e.g., socioeconomic development, population distribution, risks assessment, etc.). Measurement(s) global settlement extent Technology Type(s) satellite imaging • machine learning Factor Type(s) geographic location Sample Characteristic - Environment anthropogenic environment • populated place Sample Characteristic - Location Earth (planet) Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12424970