Outlining where humans live -- The World Settlement Footprint 2015

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 10m resolution (0.32 arc sec) global map of human settlements on Earth for the year 2015, namely the World Settlement F...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Marconcini, Mattia, Metz-Marconcini, Annekatrin, Üreyen, Soner, Palacios-Lopez, Daniela, Hanke, Wiebke, Bachofer, Felix, Zeidler, Julian, Esch, Thomas, Gorelick, Noel, Kakarla, Ashwin, Strano, Emanuele
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 28.10.2019
Subjects
Datasets
Earth
Footprints
Image resolution
Land settlement
Photointerpretation
Population distribution
Radar imaging
Radar satellites
Rural areas
Satellite imagery
Suburban areas
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary: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 10m 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.).
ISSN:2331-8422