A new map of circa 2010 global urban extent from Landsat data

Urbanization is an important driver of global change. Monitoring, understanding, and modelling its trend and impacts require accurate and updatable urban extent maps. We present here a new dataset of global urban extent for the nominal year 2010. Global land survey (GLS) 2010 dataset, which is a global orthorectified cloud-free Landsat image collection, was used to produce this dataset. Using an innovative methodology combining the strength of texture analysis and object-based image classification, we have achieved robust performance despite great differences in acquisition time, illumination, and phenology across the imagery collection. Initial assessments of the results over the entire Europe demonstrated that this new dataset is an accurate representation of urban extent with great levels of consistency over large areas.