Accurately monitoring urbanization at global scale - the world settlement footprint

Reliably monitoring global urbanization is of key importance for supporting a variety of applications involving the analysis of human presence (e.g., socioeconomic development, population distribution, risks assessment, epidemiology, conservation areas protection, etc.). To this purpose, in order to accurately outline the actual settlement extent globally we generated the World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2015, i.e. a 10m resolution binary mask derived by jointly exploiting multitemporal optical and radar satellite imagery, which outperforms all other existing similar layers. Furthermore, to characterize the urbanization occurred in the last three decades, we recently completed the WSF Evolution, i.e. a novel dataset outlining the growth of settlement extent globally at 30m spatial resolution on a yearly basis from 1985 to 2015.