Mapping Local Climate Zones for a Worldwide Database of the Form and Function of Cities

Bechtel, B., Alexander, P., Böhner, J., Ching, J., Conrad, O., Feddema, J., Mills, G., See, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2665-7065, et al. (2015). Mapping Local Climate Zones for a Worldwide Database of the Form and Function of Cities. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 4 (1) 199-219. 10.3390/ijgi4010199.

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Project: Harnessing the power of crowdsourcing to improve land cover and land-use information (CROWDLAND, FP7 617754), Exploring the potential for agricultural and biomass trade in the Commonwealth of Independent States (AGRICISTRADE, FP7 612755)

Abstract

Progress in urban climate science is severely restricted by the lack of useful information that describes aspects of the form and function of cities at a detailed spatial resolution. To overcome this shortcoming we are initiating an international effort to develop the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) to gather and disseminate this information in a consistent manner for urban areas worldwide. The first step in developing WUDAPT is a description of cities based on the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) scheme, which classifies natural and urban landscapes into categories based on climate-relevant surface properties. This methodology provides a culturally-neutral framework for collecting information about the internal physical structure of cities. Moreover, studies have shown that remote sensing data can be used for supervised LCZ mapping. Mapping of LCZs is complicated because similar LCZs in different regions have dissimilar spectral properties due to differences in vegetation, building materials and other variations in cultural and physical environmental factors. The WUDAPT protocol developed here provides an easy to understand workflow; uses freely available data and software; and can be applied by someone without specialist knowledge in spatial analysis or urban climate science. The paper also provides an example use of the WUDAPT project results.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: land cover; supervised classification; pixel-based classification; multi-temporal remote sensing; urban climate science; local climate zones; WUDAPT
Research Programs: Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM)
Depositing User: Luke Kirwan
Date Deposited: 01 Mar 2016 12:38
Last Modified: 27 Aug 2021 17:26
URI: https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/12119

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