Related papers: A framework to determine micro-level population fi…
A city (or an urban cluster) is not an isolated spatial unit, but a combination of areas with closely linked socio-economic activities. However, so far, we lack a consistent and quantitative approach to define multi-level urban clusters…
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…
Growth in the global human population this century will have momentous consequences for societies and the environment. Population growth has come with higher aggregate human welfare, but also climate change and biodiversity loss. Based on…
To better understand the dynamics of human settlements, thorough knowledge of the uncertainty in geospatial built-up surface datasets is critical. While frameworks for localized accuracy assessments of categorical gridded data have been…
To better understand current trends of urban population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, high-quality spatiotemporal population estimates are necessary. While the joint use of remote sensing and deep learning has achieved promising results for…
High quality census data are not always available in developing countries. Instead, mobile phone data are becoming a trending proxy to evaluate population density, activity and social characteristics. They offer additional advantages for…
Urban space is highly heterogeneous, with population and human activities concentrating in localized centers. However, the global organization of such intra-urban centers remains poorly understood due to the lack of consistent, comparable…
The shape of urban settlements plays a fundamental role in their sustainable planning. Properly defining the boundaries of cities is challenging and remains an open problem in the Science of Cities. Here, we propose a worldwide model to…
The sustainability of the academic ecosystem relies on researcher demographics and gender balance, yet assessing these dynamics in a timely manner for policy is challenging. Here, we propose a researcher population pyramid framework for…
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…
The amount of data that is being gathered about cities is increasing in size and specificity. However, despite this wealth of information, we still have little understanding of what really drives the processes behind urbanisation. In this…
As a vital indicator for measuring urban development, urban areas are expected to be identified explicitly and conveniently with widely available dataset thereby benefiting the planning decisions and relevant urban studies. Existing…
While traditional data systems remain fundamental to humanitarian response, they often lack the real-time responsiveness and spatial precision needed to capture increasingly complex patterns of displacement. Internal displacement reached an…
Human settlements are the cause and consequence of most environmental and societal changes on Earth; however, their location and extent is still under debate. We provide here a new 10m resolution (0.32 arc sec) global map of human…
Access to drinking water and sanitation is essential for health and well-being, yet major disparities remain, especially in data-scarce regions such as Africa. SDG 6 aims for universal access, but current monitoring relies on costly,…
Large-scale networks of human interaction, in particular country-wide telephone call networks, can be used to redraw geographical maps by applying algorithms of topological community detection. The geographic projections of the emerging…
Cities are characterized by the coexistence of general aggregate patterns, along with many local variations. This poses challenges for analyses of urban phenomena, which tend to be either too aggregated or too local, depending on the…
Understanding urban form is crucial for sustainable urban planning and enhancing quality of life. This study presents a data-driven framework to systematically identify and compare urban typologies across geographically and culturally…
Floods affected more than 2 billion people worldwide from 1998 to 2017 and their occurrence is expected to increase due to climate warming, population growth and rapid urbanization. Recent approaches for understanding the resilience of…
Economic growth is conventionally analyzed at the national level, yet cities generate the bulk of global output. Here we construct GDP trajectories for 8,808 functional urban areas (FUAs) across 165 countries over 1993-2019 using…