By the yr 2050 the world’s city inhabitants is anticipated to extend by 2.5 billion, with practically 90% of that development occurring in cities throughout Asia and Africa. To successfully plan for this inhabitants development, reply to crises, and perceive urbanization’s influence, governments, humanitarian organizations, and researchers want knowledge about buildings and infrastructure, together with how they’re altering over time. Nevertheless, many areas throughout the World South lack entry to this knowledge, hindering improvement efforts.
In 2021, we launched the Open Buildings dataset, considerably rising the variety of publicly mapped buildings in Africa. We later expanded the hassle to incorporate buildings in Latin America, the Caribbean, and South and Southeast Asia. Since then, the Open Buildings dataset has been extensively utilized by UN companies, NGOs and researchers for planning electrification, disaster response, vaccination campaigns, and extra.
Open Buildings dataset customers have requested knowledge exhibiting constructing modifications over time, which might enhance city planning and assist us higher perceive modifications in human influence on the setting. One other frequent request is for approximate constructing heights, which will help estimate inhabitants density for catastrophe response or useful resource allocation efforts. Each of those are difficult as a result of limitations of accessible high-resolution satellite tv for pc imagery captured solely at sure locations and occasions. For some rural places and the World South the final imagery was captured years in the past, making it difficult to successfully observe modifications or perceive the present state of affairs.
To that finish, we introduce the Open Buildings 2.5D Temporal Dataset, which relies on new experimental outcomes that estimate modifications over time and supply top knowledge for buildings throughout the World South. The dataset yearly generates a map of estimated constructing presence, counts and heights from 2016 to 2023, and covers a 58M km2 area throughout Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia utilizing 10m decision imagery from Sentinel-2. It may be accessed on the Open Buildings website or by means of Earth Engine.