A global product of 150-m urban building height based on spaceborne lidar.

Urban building height, as a fundamental 3D urban structural feature, has far-reaching applications. However, creating readily available datasets of recent urban building heights with fine spatial resolutions and global coverage remains a challenging task. Here, we provide a 150-m global urban building heights dataset around 2020 by combining the spaceborne lidar (Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, GEDI), multi-sourced data (Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1), and topographic data.

Spatiotemporally Explicit Mapping of Built Environment Stocks Reveals Two Centuries of Urban Development in a Fairytale City, Odense, Denmark.

The urban built environment stocks such as buildings and infrastructure provide essential services to urban residents, and their spatiotemporal dynamics are key to the circular and low-carbon transition of cities. However, spatiotemporally explicit characterization of urban built environment stocks remains hitherto limited, and previous studies on fine-grained mapping of built environment stocks often focus on an urban area without consideration of temporal dynamics. Here, we combined the emerging geospatial data and historical maps to quantify the spatially and temporally refined stocks of buildings and infrastructure and developed a novel indexing method to track the construction, demolition, and renovation for each building across various historical snapshots, with a case study of Odense, Denmark, from 1810 to 2018.

Exploring the relationship between 2D/3D landscape pattern and land surface temperature based on explainable eXtreme Gradient Boosting tree: A case study of Shanghai, China.

With more record-breaking skyscrapers built in big cities around the world, horizontal urban sprawl no longer dominates the research of urbanization rather than the vertical growth of cities. In such a context, the urban heat island problem cannot be understood by solely studying the impact of the horizontal urban expansion because the 3D structure of the urban landscape could severely alter the natural heat flux transport over the land surface and thus lead to bigger heat island problems. In addition to our current knowledge of impact of 2D landscape changes on urban thermal dynamics, it is crucial to understand the effects of 3D landscape pattern on the thermal environment, in order to maintain a sustainable and eco-friendly urban development.

Effects of urban forms on CO emissions in China from a multi-perspective analysis.

Effectively evaluating the effects of urban forms on CO emissions has become a hot topic in socioeconomic sustainable development; however, few studies have been able to explore the urban form-CO emission relationships from a multi-perspective view. Here, we attempted to analyze the relationships between urban forms and CO emissions in 264 Chinese cities, with explicit consideration of the government policies, urban area size, population size, and economic structure. First, urban forms were calculated using the urban land derived from multiple-source remote sensing data.

Nighttime Light Images Reveal Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Global Anthropogenic Resources Accumulation above Ground.

Urbanization and industrialization represent largely a process of transforming materials from biosphere and lithosphere to anthroposphere. Understanding the patterns of such anthropogenic material stock accumulation is thus a fundamental prerequisite to assess and sustain how humans alter the biophysical movements of resources around Earth. Previous studies on these anthropogenic stocks, however, are often limited to the global and national scales, due to data gaps at higher spatial resolutions.