Related papers: Outlining where humans live -- The World Settlemen…
Today 7.2 billion people inhabit the Earth and by 2050 this number will have risen to around nine billion, of which about 70 percent will be living in cities. Hence, it is essential to understand drivers, dynamics, and impacts of the human…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
High-resolution human settlement maps provide detailed delineations of where people live and are vital for scientific and practical purposes, such as rapid disaster response, allocation of humanitarian resources, and international…
A substantial share of the Earth's land surface is managed by humans, with cities representing the most extreme form of anthropogenic land use. There are zillion ways in which settlements can be arranged across a given area, and their…
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus,…
Spatially consistent and up-to-date maps of human settlements are crucial for addressing policies related to urbanization and sustainability, especially in the era of an increasingly urbanized world.The availability of open and free…
High resolution datasets of population density which accurately map sparsely-distributed human populations do not exist at a global scale. Typically, population data is obtained using censuses and statistical modeling. More recently,…
In an impending urban age where the majority of the world's population will live in cities, it is critical that we improve our understanding of the strengths and limitations of existing city designs to ensure they are safe, clean, can…
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus,…
Informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. In order to deliver effective economic and social aid, non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund…
Urbanization has been the dominant demographic trend in the entire world, during the last half century. Rural to urban migration, international migration, and the re-classification or expansion of existing city boundaries have been among…
Accurate and consistent mapping of urban and rural areas is crucial for sustainable development, spatial planning, and policy design. It is particularly important in simulating the complex interactions between human activities and natural…
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of…
Understanding how buildings are distributed globally is crucial to revealing the human footprint on our home planet. This built environment affects local climate, land surface albedo, resource distribution, and many other key factors that…
The major Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030, set by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), include sustainable cities and communities, no poverty, and reduced inequalities. However, millions of people live in slums or…
In the last several years, remote sensing technology has opened up the possibility of performing large scale building detection from satellite imagery. Our work is some of the first to create population density maps from building detection…
In 2012 the world's population exceeded 7 billion, and since 2008 the number of individuals living in urban areas has surpassed that of rural areas. This is the result of an overall increase of life expectancy in many countries that has…
We consider the general character of the spatial distribution of a population that grows through reproduction and subsequent local resettlement of new population members. We present several simple one and two-dimensional point placement…
We propose a generalizable framework for the population estimation of dense, informal settlements in low-income urban areas--so called 'slums'--using high-resolution satellite imagery. Precise population estimates are a crucial factor for…
Analyzing the planet at scale with satellite imagery and machine learning is a dream that has been constantly hindered by the cost of difficult-to-access highly-representative high-resolution imagery. To remediate this, we introduce here…