Mapping Global Urban Impervious Surface and Green Space Fractions Using Google Earth Engine

Urban impervious surfaces area (ISA) and green space (GS), two primary components of urban environment, are pivotal in detecting urban environmental quality and addressing global environmental change issues. However, the current global mapping of ISA and GS is not effective enough to accurately delineate in urban areas due to the mosaicked and complex structure. To address the issue, the hierarchical architecture principle and subpixel metric method were applied to map 30 m global urban ISA and GS fractions for the years 2015 and circa 2020. We use random forest algorithms for retrieval of the Normalized Settlement Density Index and Normalized Green Space Index from Landsat images using Google Earth Engine. The correlation coefficients of global urban ISA and GS fractions were all higher than 0.9 for 2015 and circa 2020. Our results show global urban ISA and GS areas in circa 2020 were 31.19 × 104 km2 and 17.16 × 104 km2, respectively. The novel ISA and GS fractions product can show potential applications in assessing the effects of urbanization on climate, ecology, and urban sustainability.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Remote Sensing

• Publication date

  2021-10-19

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3390/rs13204187
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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