World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2015 v2 - Landsat-8/Sentinel-1 - Global

The World Settlement Footprint WSF 2015 version 2 (WSF2015 v2) is a 10m resolution binary mask outlining the extent of human settlements globally for the year 2015. Specifically, the WSF2015 v2 is a pilot product generated by combining multiple datasets, namely:

• The WSF2015 v1 derived at 10m spatial resolution by means of 2014-2015 multitemporal Landsat-8 and Sentinel-1 imagery (of which ~217K and ~107K scenes have been processed, respectively); https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00580-5

• The High Resolution Settlement Layer (HRSL) generated by the Connectivity Lab team at Facebook through the employment of 2016 DigitalGlobe VHR satellite imagery and publicly released at 30m spatial resolution for 214 countries; https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05839.pdf

• The novel WSF2019 v1 derived at 10m spatial resolution by means of 2019 multitemporal Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery (of which ~ 1.2M and ~1.8M scenes have been processed, respectively); https://doi.org/10.1553/giscience2021_01_s33

The WSF2015 v1 demonstrated to be highly accurate, outperforming all similar existing global layers; however, the use of Landsat imagery prevented a proper detection of very small structures, mostly due to their reduced scale. Based on an extensive qualitative assessment, wherever available the HRSL layer shows instead a systematic underestimation of larger settlements, whereas it proves particularly effective in identifying smaller clusters of buildings down to single houses, thanks to the employment of 2016 VHR imagery. The WSF2015v v2 has been then generated by: i) merging the WSF2015 v1 and HRSL (after resampling to 10m resolution and disregarding the population density information attached); and ii) masking the outcome by means of the WSF2019 product, which exhibits even higher detail and accuracy, also thanks to the use of Sentinel-2 data and the proper employment of state-of-the-art ancillary datasets (which allowed, for instance, to effectively mask out all roads globally from motorways to residential).

Citation proposal
Mattia Marconcini (German Aerospace Center (DLR)). World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2015 v2 - Landsat-8/Sentinel-1 - Global. https://gdk.gdi-de.org/geonetwork/srv/api/records/3030d15a-ae84-45f1-9ada-4964543339dc

Simple

Date ( Creation ): 2021-04-01T12:13:30

Edition: 2

Identifier: https://geoservice.dlr.de/catalogue/srv/metadata/3030d15a-ae84-45f1-9ada-4964543339dc

Presentation form: Digital map

Other citation details: DOI: 10.15489/6n5h1ezef920

Purpose: The main objective of the World Settlement Footprint project is to depict the globals settlement extent.

Status: Completed

Author

German Aerospace Center (DLR) - Mattia Marconcini

Point of contact

DLR/EOC Land Surface Dynamics - WSF Team

Point of contact

German Aerospace Center (DLR) - EOC Geoservice

Maintenance and update frequency: As needed

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0 ( Theme )

Land cover

Spatial scope

global

Keywords

global
urbanization
land
settlement extent
Landsat-8
Sentinel-1
opendata
inspireidentifiziert

Use limitation: Nutzungseinschränkungen: Das DLR ist nicht haftbar für Schäden, die sich aus der Nutzung ergeben. / Use Limitations: DLR not liable for damage resulting from use.

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Use constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: Nutzungsbedingungen: Lizenz, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 / Terms of use: License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Other constraints

{"id": "cc-by/4.0",

"name": "Creative Commons Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)",

"url": "http://dcat-ap.de/def/licenses/cc-by/4.0",

"quelle": "Copyright DLR (2021)"}

Spatial representation type: Grid

Denominator: 20000

Metadata language: English

Character set: UTF8

Topic category

Imagery base maps earth cover

Supplemental Information

Number of dimensions: 2

Dimension name: Column

Dimension size: 4007549

Resolution: 10 m

Dimension name: Row

Dimension size: 1558491

Resolution: 10 m

Cell geometry: Area

Transformation parameter availability: false

Distribution format

GeoTIFF ()

OnLine resource: WSF_2015
World Settlement Footprint 2015 v2

OnLine resource: https://geoservice.dlr.de/eoc/land/wms?SERVICE=WMS%26REQUEST=GetCapabilities

OnLine resource: EOC Geoservice Map Context
EOC Geoservice Map Context

OnLine resource: EOC Download Service
EOC Download Service

OnLine resource: EOC STAC Collection
EOC STAC Collection

OnLine resource: World Settlement Footprint - DLR Blog
World Settlement Footprint - DLR Blog

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Domain consistency

Measure identification: INSPIRE / Conformity_001

Conformance result

Date ( Publication ): 2010-12-08

Explanation: See the referenced specification

Pass: true

Statement: The WSF2015 v2 is a pilot product generated by combining three different global layers, namely the WSF2015 v1, Facebook’s HRSL and WSF2019.

Description

World Settlement Footprint - WSF2015 Processing:

Processing:

After merging the WSF2015 v1 and HRSL (resampled at 10m resolution disregarding the population density information attached) by preserving pixels masked as settlement in any of the two layers, the resulting outcome has been masked by means of the WSF2019 product.

Quality Assurance:

The WSF2015v2 is obtained by combining datasets whose quality has been individually thoroughly assessed by means of dedicated validation exercises. In particular, for the WSF2015 v1 and WSF2019 >700,00 ground-truth samples have been collected by crowdsourcing photointerpretation in collaboration with Google. To this purpose a statistically robust and transparent protocol has been defined following recommended state-of-the-art practices.