World Settlement Footprint (WSF)
More than half of the world’s population is living in urban areas and the trend of rapid urbanization is ongoing. Since settlements - and urban areas in particular - represent the centers of human activity; the environmental, economic, political, societal and cultural impacts of urbanization is far-reaching. They include negative aspects like the loss of natural habitats, biodiversity and fertile soils, climate impacts, waste, pollution, natural and man-made disasters, 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. We provide a new 10m resolution (0.32 arc sec) global map of human settlements on Earth for the years 2015 and 2019, namely the World Settlement Footprint 2015 and the World Settlement Footprint 2019 (Media 1). Additionally, the WSF Evolution (Media 2) and the WSF 3D (Media 3) are part of the product suite. The WSF Evolution is an annual time series of the World Settlement Footprint at 30m resolution from the years 1985 to 2015. The WSF 3D depicts detailed quantification of the average height, total volume, total area and the fraction of buildings at 90m resolution at a global scale. In addition to the global WSF products, we provide additional building data for Germany. Besides the building footprints with a 1m resolution (Media 4) the datasets depict information on building height (Media 5) and building volume. The datasets can be used at any scale of observation in support to all applications requiring detailed and accurate information on places with human presence (e.g., socioeconomic development, population distribution, risk assessment, etc.). In order to make the data available to a broad public, we provide a catalog service in addition to established download and visualization services. Our SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) gives users the ability not only to search and filter data, but also to access and process it directly. This technology enables more efficient handling of data. Data transfer of large amounts of data can be prevented and storage and energy capacities can be conserved.
Resources
NFDI4Earth Pilot
- Pilot report (Zenodo )
WSF data sets
IÖR Monitor data sets
| Collections | IÖR Monitor | EO Products Service (STAC) - by DLR |
|---|---|---|
| IOER Building Footprints Complete Germany 1m | https://monitor.ioer.de/fdzdata/1m_buildings_complete/ | https://geoservice.dlr.de/eoc/ogc/stac/v1/collections/IOER_BUILDINGS_COMP_GER_1M |
| IOER Building Footprints non-residential Germany 1m | https://monitor.ioer.de/fdzdata/1m_buildings_nonresidential/ | https://geoservice.dlr.de/eoc/ogc/stac/v1/collections/IOER_BUILDINGS_NONRES_GER_1M |
| IOER Building Structure - Volume - Germany, 100m | https://monitor.ioer.de/fdzdata/100m_buildings_volume/ | https://geoservice.dlr.de/eoc/ogc/stac/v1/collections/IOER_STRUCTURE_VOLUME_GER_100M |