Urbanization, a major driver of global change, profoundly impacts our physical and social world, for example, altering not just water and carbon cycling, biodiversity, and climate, but also demography, public health, and economy. Understanding these consequences for better scientific insights and effective decision-making unarguably requires accurate information on urban extent and its spatial distributions. We developed a method to map the urban extent from the defense meteorological satellite program/operational linescan system nighttime stable-light data at the global level and created a new global 1 km urban extent map for the year 2000. Our map shows that globally, urban is about 0.5% of total land area but ranges widely at the regional level, from 0.1% in Oceania to 2.3% in Europe. At the country level, urbanized land varies from about 0.01 to 10%, but is lower than 1% for most (70%) countries. Urbanization follows land mass distribution, as anticipated, with the highest concentration between 30° N and 45° N latitude and the largest longitudinal peak around 80° W. Based on a sensitivity analysis and comparison with other global urban area products, we found that our global product of urban areas provides a reliable estimate of global urban areas and offers the potential for producing a time-series of urban area maps for temporal dynamics analyses.
Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory College Park, MD 20740, USA;Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory College Park, MD 20740, USA;School of Environment and Natural Resources, OARDC, Ohio State University, Wooster, OH 44691, USA;Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20740, USA;Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory College Park, MD 20740, USA;Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory College Park, MD 20740, USA;Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory College Park, MD 20740, USA;Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory College Park, MD 20740, USA;State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, People’s Republic of China;Earth Observation Group, NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Boulder, CO 80303, USA
Recommended Citation:
Yuyu Zhou,Steven J Smith,Kaiguang Zhao,et al. A global map of urban extent from nightlights[J]. Environmental Research Letters,2015-01-01,10(5)