global urban footprint available

global urban footprint available

m

News | Urban

November 22, 2016

Global Urban Footprint (GUF) by DLR (Thomas Esch) for Italy to Croatia.

Global Urban Footprint (GUF) by DLR (Thomas Esch) for Italy to Croatia.

The Global Urban Footprint by DLR (Thomas Esch) has been released and provides a global coverage of urbanized areas. Previous versions of this data set has already been used by ongoing research in our department and we will now update the data for our scientific work. It is a great source for mapping human impact on a global scale.  From the DLR website: Currently, more than half of the world’s population are urban dwellers and this number is still rapidly increasing. Since settlements – and urban areas in particular – represent the centers of human activity, the environmental, economic, political, societal and cultural impacts of urbanization are far-reaching. They include negative aspects like the loss of natural habitats, biodiversity and fertile soils, climate impacts, waste, pollution, crime, social conflicts or transportation and traffic problems, making urbanization to one of the most pressing global challenges. Accordingly, a profound understanding of the global spatial distribution and evolution of human settlements constitutes a key element in envisaging strategies to assure sustainable development of urban and rural settlements.

In this framework, the objective of the “Global Urban Footprint” (GUF) project is the worldwide mapping of settlements with unprecedented spatial resolution of 0.4 arcsec (~12 m). A total of 180 000 TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X scenes have been processed to create the GUF. The resulting map shows the Earth in three colors only: black for “urban areas”, white for “land surface” and grey for “water”. This reduction emphasizes the settlement patterns and allows for the analysis of urban structures, and hence the proportion of settled areas, the regional population distribution and the arrangement of rural and urban areas. More details at: www.dlr.de/guf

Further data portals and visualizations are available here:
Via U-TEP Website: https://urban-tep.eo.esa.int
U-TEP Geobrowser: https://urban-tep.eo.esa.int/geobrowser/?id=guf

and a ESA GUF article: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/New_map_offers_precise_snapshot_of_human_life_on_Earth

follow us and share it on:

you may also like:

Getting Ready for 25 + 10

Getting Ready for 25 + 10

Next week's the big one. Twenty five years of EORC and ten years of EAGLE, all in one event, and we're expecting around 250 people through the door. Sabine Oppmann's been leading the prep meetings, and we've split things into clear teams: setup, catering, AV and...

Dr. Ariane Droin in front of the camera: RTL reports on HABITRACK

Dr. Ariane Droin in front of the camera: RTL reports on HABITRACK

A film crew from RTL showed up in the Oberpfalz this spring, and joint a field campaign by the Habitrack BMFTR funded project. Dr. Ariane Droin, who leads the Würzburg side of the MONID HABITRACK project at EORC, walked the RTL team through what the project is...

A Weekend together: Where the Institute Talks About Itself

A Weekend together: Where the Institute Talks About Itself

Once a year, or at least that's the idea, the Institute of Geography packs up and heads out to a remote place, this time Burg Rothenfels, an old castle not far from Würzburg, to spend a weekend doing something that almost never happens in the day to day grind:...

Graduation Day: EORC and EAGLE Celebrate at the Faculty Ceremony

Graduation Day: EORC and EAGLE Celebrate at the Faculty Ceremony

Last week the faculty held its formal graduation ceremony, and EORC and EAGLE were well represented on stage. Two of our PhD students, Dr. Ariane Droin and Dr. Johannes Mast, both joint the ceremony for their doctoral degrees, and it was great to see them walk across...

Share This