Combining expert and crowd-sourced training data to map urban form and functions for the continental US

Abstract

Although continental urban areas are relatively small, they are major drivers of environmental change at local, regional and global scales. Moreover, they are especially vulnerable to these changes owing to the concentration of population and their exposure to a range of hydro-meteorological hazards, emphasizing the need for spatially detailed information on urbanized landscapes. These data need to be consistent in content and scale and provide a holistic description of urban layouts to address different user needs. Here, we map the continental United States into Local Climate Zone (LCZ) types at a 100 m spatial resolution using expert and crowd-sourced information. There are 10 urban LCZ types, each associated with a set of relevant variables such that the map represents a valuable database of urban properties. These data are benchmarked against continental-wide existing and novel geographic databases on urban form. We anticipate the dataset provided here will be useful for researchers and practitioners to assess how the configuration, size, and shape of cities impact the important human and environmental outcomes.

LCZ Generator: A Web Application to Create Local Climate Zone Maps

“…The e-mail is required since the results of the LCZ Generator are sent via e-mail. If the author consents, the (Stewart and Oke, 2012;Demuzere et al, 2020a). author's first and last name are displayed in the publicly accessible submission table and factsheet (see section 2.4).…”

“…Despite this new focus on cities as a critical scale for climate change management, we know very little about most cities on the planet-being generally ignorant of their extent, how they are constructed and how they are occupied (Demuzere et al, 2020a). First and foremost, climate-relevant urban data consistent in coverage, scale, and content are needed to support risk assessment and its management and to enable effective knowledge transfer between cities.…”

“…The right data at the right scale are an essential prerequisite for developing fit-for-purpose urban planning policies (Georgescu et al, 2015). A number of projects have mapped the global urban extent at finer and finer detail (e.g., Pesaresi et al, 2013;Corbane et al, 2017;Esch et al, 2017;Gong et al, 2020), but these efforts need to be complemented by a wider range of information-rich intra-urban classes that describe different types of urban land covers and land uses: the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) typology is a good example of such classification scheme (Stewart and Oke, 2012;Demuzere et al, 2020a;Reba and Seto, 2020).…”

“…The LCZ classes are formally defined as "regions of uniform surface cover, structure, material, and human activity that span hundreds of meters to several kilometers in horizontal scale, " exclude "class names and definitions that are culture or region specific, " and are characterized by "a characteristic screen-height temperature regime that is most apparent over dry surfaces, on calm, clear nights, and in areas of simple relief " (Stewart and Oke, 2012). Its universality has important advantages, as it allows a systematic comparability of global intra-and inter-urban heat island studies (e.g., Bechtel et al, 2019a), provides a common platform for knowledge exchange and the description of urban canopy parameters in urban ecosystem processes, and supports model applications, especially for cities with little or insufficient data infrastructure (Stewart and Oke, 2012;Ching et al, 2018;Brousse et al, 2019Brousse et al, , 2020bDemuzere et al, 2020a;Varentsov et al, 2020).…”

Urban-Scale Evaluation of Cool Pavement Impacts on the Urban Heat Island Effect and Climate Change

“…This is true because previous studies have not had consistent scope and did not explore the impact of local urban context. The microclimate, morphology, and prevailing traffic vary significantly within a city [30][31][32] These differences play an important role in the net impact of pavement albedo modification.…”