Aneta J. Florczyk

• PhD
• Scientific / Technical Project Officer at European Commission

The Degree of Urbanisation is a new definition of cities, towns and semi-dense areas, and rural areas endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission. The urban population share according to the Degree of Urbanisation is similar to the one based on national definitions in the Americas, Europe and Oceania, but considerably higher in Africa and Asia. An em...

Protected areas (PAs) are a key strategy in global efforts to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services that are critical for human well-being. Most PAs have some built-up structures within their boundaries or in surrounding areas, ranging from individual buildings to villages, towns and cities. These structures, and the associated human activit...

The Atlas of the Human Planet 2019 presents key human settlements and urbanisation statistics for 239 countries based on the progress made towards the development of a people-based global harmonised definition of cities and rural areas. Figures and statistics presented in the Atlas 2019 are the result of massive automatic big data processing carrie...

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 aspires to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”, and the introduction of an explicit urban goal testifies to the importance of urbanisation. The understanding of the process of urbanisation and the capacity to monitor the SDGs require a wealth of open, reliable, locally...

The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) produces new global spatial information, evidence-based analytics and knowledge describing the human presence on the planet Earth. The GHSL operates in a fully open and free data and methods access policy, building the knowledge supporting the definition, the public discussion and the implementation of Europ...

The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) produces new global spatial information, evidence-based analytics describing the human presence on the planet that is based mainly on two quantitative factors: (i) the spatial distribution (density) of built-up structures and (ii) the spatial distribution (density) of resident people. Both of the factors are...

Geo-information on settlements from Earth Observation offers a base for objective and scalable monitoring of the evolution of cities and settlements, including their location, extent and other attributes. In this work, we deploy the best available global knowledge on the presence of human settlements and built-up structures derived from Earth Obser...

The Global Human Settlement Layer Urban Centres Database (GHS-UCDB) is the most complete database on cities to date, publicly released as an open and free dataset - GHS STAT UCDB2015MT GLOBE R2019A V1.0. The database represents the global status on Urban Centres in 2015 by offering cities location, their extent (surface, shape), and describing each...

Data on global population distribution are a strategic resource currently in high demand in an age of new Development Agendas that call for universal inclusiveness of people. However, quality, detail, and age of census data varies significantly by country and suffers from shortcomings that propagate to derived population grids and their application...

The Atlas of the Human Planet 2018 describes the Urban Centre Database, produced in the framework of the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) project, by applying a global definition of cities and settlements to the GHSL data. The Atlas presents the key findings of the analysis of geographic, environmental and socio-economic variables that were gat...

There is an increasing availability of geospatial data describing patterns of human settlement and population such as various global remote-sensing based built-up land layers, fine-grained census-based population estimates, and publicly available cadastral and building footprint data. This development constitutes new integrative modeling opportunit...

The validation of built‐up areas derived from different sensors is crucial for gaining a deeper understanding of the consistency and interoperability between them. This article presents the methodology and results of an inter‐sensor comparison of built‐up area data derived from Landsat, Sentinel‐1, Sentinel‐2, and SPOT5/SPOT6. The assessment was pe...

The presence of green spaces within city centres has been recognized as a valuable component of the city landscape. Vegetation provides a variety of benefits including energy saving, improved air quality, reduced noise pollution, decreased ambient temperature and psychological restoration. Evidence also shows that the amount of vegetation, known as...

The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) produces new global spatial information, evidence-based analytics and knowledge describing the human presence on the planet based mainly on two quantitative factors: i) the spatial distribution (density) of built-up structures and ii) the spatial distribution (density) of resident people. Both factors are ob...

The surge of sustainable urban development challenges at the world polity level during the Post-2015 Development Agenda process and the consolidation of specific goals and indicators for sustainable urban development leave no room for gaps in urbanization knowledge, information and reporting. SDG 11 aspires to “Make cities and human settlements inc...

Exposure is reported to be the biggest determinant of disaster risk, it is continuously growing and by monitoring and understanding its variations over time it is possible to address disaster risk reduction, also at the global level. This work uses Earth observation image archives to derive information on human settlements that are used to quantify...

In the last few decades the magnitude and impacts of planetary urban transformations have become increasingly evident to scientists and policymakers. The ability to understand these processes remained limited in terms of territorial scope and comparative capacity for a long time: data availability and harmonization were among the main constraints....

Megacities are urban agglomerations hosting at least 10 million inhabitants. The rise in number, population size, and spatial extent of megacities are among the most prominent manifestations of the process of urbanisation taking place in the contemporary urban age. Until recently, urban growth has been quantified with data derived from satellites m...

Continuous global-scale mapping of human settlements in support to international agreements calls for massive volumes of multi-source, multi-temporal and multi-scale Earth Observation (EO) data. In this paper, the latest developments in terms of processing EO datacubes for the purpose of improving the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) data are p...

Continuous global-scale mapping of human settlements in the service of international agreements calls for massive volume of multi-source, multi-temporal, and multi-scale earth observation data. In this paper, the latest developments in terms of processing big earth observation data for the purpose of improving the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS...

The Atlas of the Human Planet 2017. Global Exposure to Natural Hazards summarizes the global multi-temporal analysis of exposure to six major natural hazards: earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, tropical cyclone winds, and sea level surge. The exposure focuses on human settlements assessed through two variables: the global built-up and the gl...

There is an increasing availability of multi-temporal land use and built-up land datasets. However, little research has been done regarding the spatiotemporal uncertainty of these datasets. In this work we present an approach for the spatiotemporal validation of the novel Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) made by automatic classification of glob...

There is an increasing availability of multi-temporal land use and built-up land datasets. However, little research has been done regarding the spatiotemporal uncertainty of these data products. In this work we present an approach that has the potential to be applicable for spatiotemporal evaluation of the novel Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL)...

An increasing amount of multi-temporal land use and built-up land datasets will be made available in the near future. However, little research has been done regarding the spatiotemporal uncertainty of these datasets. Publicly available cadastral parcel data including temporal information about construction dates of structures may be a useful source...

Global human settlement information is required by a number of institutions operating globally, and to derive standardised, action-oriented indicators. The new Landsat-based Global Human Settlement Layer provides such information baseline. The dataset describes the spatial evolution of human settlements in the past 40 years. The automatic processin...

Global human settlement information is required by a number of institutions operating globally, and also it will be essential for developing indicators, for international framework agreements including the Sendai framework for Disaster Risk Reduction or Sustainable Development Goals. These indicators should be action oriented, global in nature and...

The increasing amount of free and open remote sensing data suggests that a number of multitemporal land use and built-up land datasets derived from remotely sensed imagery will be made available soon. However, little research has been done regarding the approaches to evaluate spatiotemporal uncertainty of such products. Employing publicly available...

Although more than half of the Earth’s population live in urban areas, we know remarkably little about most cities and what we do know is incomplete (lack of coverage) and inconsistent (varying definitions and scale). While there have been considerable advances in the derivation of a global urban mask using satellite information, the complexity of...

Although more than half of the Earth’s population live in urban areas, we know remarkably little about most cities and what we do know is incomplete (lack of coverage) and inconsistent (varying definitions and scale). While there have been considerable advances in the derivation of a global urban mask using satellite information, the complexity of...

Monitoring of the human-induced changes and the availability of reliable andmethodologically consistent urban area maps are essential to support sustainable urban developmenton a global scale. The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) is a project funded by the EuropeanCommission, Joint Research Centre, which aims at providing scientific methods and...

Better and finer global analyses of human exposure and risk of natural disasters require improved geoinformation on population distribution and densities, in particular concerning temporal and spatial resolution and capacity for change assessment. This paper presents the development of new multi-temporal global population grids and illustrates thei...

A new global information baseline describing the spatial evolution of the human settlements in the past 40 years is presented. It is the most spatially global detailed data available today dedicated to human settlements, and it shows the greatest temporal depth. The core processing methodology relies on a new supervised classification paradigm base...

An application of a general methodology for processing very high-resolution imagery to produce a European Settlement Map (ESM) in support of policy-makers is presented. The process mapped around 10 million [Formula: see text] of the European continent. The input image data are satellite SPOT-5/6 pan-sharpened multispectral images of 2.5- and 1.5-m...

Natural disasters continue to pose a significant threat to human populations and infrastructure. To assess the risk of a certain threat, warning systems combine the hazard observed with the exposure of population and infrastructure to obtain an alert level. This exposure is usually obtained from a variety of locally or globally available datasets,...

Improving analyses of population exposure to potential natural hazards, especially sudden ones, requires more detailed geodemographic data. Availability of such information for large areas is limited by specific database requirements and their cost. This paper introduces and tests a new approach for refining spatio-temporal population distribution...

The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) is supported by the European Commission, Joint Research Center (JRC) in the frame of his institutional research activities. Scope of GHSL is developing, testing and applying the technologies and analysis methods integrated in the JRC Global Human Settlement analysis platform for applications in support to gl...

This paper describes how Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can support automatic information retrieval (IR) from big remote sensing (RS) data on an example of the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL)[1]. Here, the OpenStreetMap 1 (OSM) derived data are used within a satellite imagery processing framework at several stages of an information l...

The breakthrough developments in geospatial technologies and the increasing availability of spatial data make geoinformation a business and a decisional element to the management. Hence, it is important to have a management plan to factor in practical and feasible data sources, in building geo applications. The authors of this paper are motivated b...

Jurisdictional domains are legal divisions of the Earth’s surface frequently used in classification and search systems for location-based queries. However, there are few compilations of jurisdictional domains that include their evolution. One of the causes is the complexity of their generation. As an advance in this area, this paper describes a pro...

This paper describes the methodology and the results of a comprehensive automatic image classification task aiming to map the European settlements using 2.5m-resolution input data. The processing approach is consistent with the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) [1]; certain adjustments were driven by the specific input data characteristics and t...

The validation of the metadata associated with digitalized maps is one of the main problems related to the preservation of cartographic information in digital map libraries. This article describes the first research phases of a new automatic method to ensure the validity of spatial metadata. The method is based on the combination of spatial cluster...

Orthoimages are essential in many Web applications to facilitate the background context that helps to understand other georeferenced information. Catalogues and service registries of Spatial Data Infrastructures do not necessarily register all the services providing access to imagery data on the Web, and it is not easy to automatically identify whe...

Jurisdictional domains are generally accepted political divisions of the earth surface that cover specific territorial and functional scopes over time. They are frequently used in information retrieval (IR) to classify and locate resources by means of their geographical location. However, the changes they suffer over time reduce their applicability...

Web resources that are not part of any Spatial Data Infrastructure can be an important source of information. However, the incorporation of Web resources within a Spatial Data Infrastructure requires a significant effort to create metadata. This work presents an extensible architecture for an automatic characterisation of Web resources and a strate...

Purpose There is an open discussion in the geographic information community about the use of digital libraries or search engines for the discovery of resources. Some researchers suggest that search engines are a feasible alternative for searching geographic web services based on anecdotal evidence. The purpose of this study is to measure the perfor...

The OpenGIS Catalogue Services (CS) specification defines a set of abstract interfaces for the discovery, access, maintenance and organization of metadata repositories of geospatial information and related resources in distributed computing scenarios, such as the Web. The CS specification also defines a HTTP protocol binding, which is called “Catal...

The Semantic Web is an attempt to add meaningful annotations to Web resources, services and content that requires developing reference ontologies, which help to understand these annotations. The venue of the Web of Data makes the geographic information, which has become an important part of the current Web, widely usable. This paper demonstrates h...

Geocoding has become one of the most popular on-line services. Nowadays, there exist many Web Services providing geocoding functionality which differ not only in technological aspects (interface, invocation style, etc.) or terms of use, but also in type of geographic information provided and spatial data quality. Currently, there is no problem to f...

The administrative units have been created with the purpose of covering specific territorial and functional scopes over time. Therefore, there are heterogeneity not only among states but also at any level of subdivision. In the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures, administrative units are part of the core data model and they are often exploite...

Resumen El Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza en su deseo de facilitar la interacción con la información pública, plantea la evolución de los componentes tradicionales que integran IDEZar hacia servicios enfocados al usuario de forma que éstos puedan participar activamente en la infraestructura evolucionando así hacia la nueva IDE 2.0. Esta nueva concepción...

The INSPIRE services network architecture establishes rules for the architectural model of the European Spatial Data Infrastructure. Each Member State of the European Union should create new services or adapt existing ones according to the Implementing Rules derived from the INSPIRE directive. A INSPIRE Drafting Team is responsible for the definiti...

Nowadays, there is no problem in accessing to geocoding providers but in choosing the proper one. The application requirements determine the selection of the service in a context where the user needs an answer and is not often interested in knowing where to find the right information. This paper presents an architectural approach for compound geoco...

The distribution of OGC Web Catalogues (CSW) across pro-fessional communities, the expert profile of the catalogue user and also the low coverage of OGC Web Services (OWS) in standard search engines reduce the possibility of discovery and sharing geographic information. This paper presents an approach to simple spatio-temporal search of OWS retriev...