Abstract
Human settlement plays a key role in understanding social processes such as urbanization and interactions between human and environmental systems but not much is known about the landscape evolution before the era of operational remote sensing technology. In this study, housing and property databases are used to create new gridded settlement layers describing human settlement processes at fine spatial and temporal resolution in the conterminous United States between 1810 and 2015. The main products are a raster composite layer representing the year of first settlement, and a raster time series of built-up intensity representing the sum of building areas in a pixel. Several accompanying uncertainty surfaces are provided to ensure the user is informed about inherent spatial, temporal and thematic uncertainty in the data. A validation study using high quality reference data confirms high levels of accuracy of the resulting data products. These settlement data will be of great interest in disciplines in which the long-term evolution of human settlement represents crucial information to explore novel research questions.
Highlights
Background & SummaryHow and at what rate did key demographic processes such as urbanization or rural-urban transitions evolve at fine granularity and over long time periods? And what can we learn from it for future development of urban systems and landscape fragmentation over large geographic scales? Answering these kinds of questions requires a profound knowledge and understanding of settlement histories, demographic compositions and landscape evolution over large geographic areas, at fine spatial resolution and over extended periods of time
Existing historical data are limited to times since medium and fine resolution satellite remote sensing technology became fully operational to produce land cover databases such as the National Land Cover Database (NLCD)[1,2,3], population grids such as the Gridded Population of the World (GPW)[4,5] and its accompanying Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP)[6], the WorldPop population distribution datasets[7,8], the Global Urban Footprint (GUF)[9] and the LandScan population datasets[10,11] or human settlement layers such as the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL)[12,13]
In this article we describe the creation and properties of novel historical human settlement layers from 1810 to 2015, with a temporal resolution of five years and a spatial resolution of 250 m for most of the conterminous United States
Summary
Answering these kinds of questions requires a profound knowledge and understanding of settlement histories, demographic compositions and landscape evolution over large geographic areas, at fine spatial resolution and over extended periods of time Such knowledge is very limited to date, mainly due to the lack of current data infrastructure that would enable researchers to carry out such retrospective analysis. Such unique series of settlement layers have the potential of redefining our understanding of the evolution of human built environments and rural-urban transitional processes that shaped the North American settlement history over two centuries They will be in high demand by researchers in the social and natural sciences including landscape ecology, demography or urban geography for questions related to resource assessment, natural hazards, vulnerability or land cover change. We evaluated the data products against a highly accurate validation sample of building footprints with temporal information covering 29 U.S counties
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