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March 2009 - February 2012
Publications
Publications (173)
Despite the rapid growth of cities in the past century, our quantitative, in-depth understanding of how cities grow remains limited due to a consistent lack of historical data. Thus, the scaling laws between a city's features and its population as they evolve over time, known as temporal city scaling, is under-explored, especially for time periods...
The most destructive and deadly wildfires in US history were also fast. Using satellite data, we analyzed the daily growth rates of more than 60,000 fires from 2001 to 2020 across the contiguous US. Nearly half of the ecoregions experienced destructive fast fires that grew more than 1620 hectares in 1 day. These fires accounted for 78% of structure...
The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) project fosters an enhanced, public understanding of the human presence on Earth. A decade after its inception in the Digital Earth 2020 vision, GHSL is an established project of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and an integral part of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. The 2023 GHSL...
Rural America is often depicted as a distressed and left-behind place, with limited opportunities for the children growing up there. This paper addresses this topic by examining the dynamics of rural places over the past four decades and how these changes impact the economic mobility of children raised in poor rural households. Employing a place-ba...
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of defining city boundaries and a lack of historical data to study city dynamics over time and space. To address this...
Understanding changes in the built environment is vital for sustainable urban development and disaster preparedness. Recent years have seen the emergence of a variety of global, continent-level, and nation-wide datasets related to the current state and the evolution of the built environment, human settlements or building stocks. However, such datas...
Multi-temporal measurements quantifying the changes to the Earth's surface are critical for understanding many natural, anthropogenic, and social processes. Researchers typically use remotely sensed Earth observation data to quantify and characterize such changes in land use and land cover (LULC). However, such data sources are limited in their ava...
Geospatial datasets derived from remote sensing data by means of machine learning methods are often based on probabilistic outputs of abstract nature, which are difficult to translate into interpretable measures. For example, the Global Human Settlement Layer GHS-BUILT-S2 product reports the probability of the presence of built-up areas in 2018 in...
Rural-urban classifications are essential for analyzing geographic, demographic, environmental, and social processes across the rural–urban continuum. Most existing classifications are, however, only available at relatively aggregated spatial scales, such as at the county scale in the United States. The absence of rurality or urbanness measures at...
Multi-temporal measurements quantifying the changes to the Earth’s surface are critical for understanding many natural, anthropogenic, and social processes. Researchers typically use remotely sensed earth observation data to quantify and characterize such changes in land use and land cover (LULC). However, such data sources are limited in their ava...
Geospatial datasets derived from remote sensing data by means of machine learning methods are often based on probabilistic outputs of abstract nature, which are difficult to translate into interpretable measures. For example, the Global Human Settlement Layer GHS-BUILT-S2 product reports the probability of the presence of built-up areas in 2018 in...
Researchers in Earth and environmental science can extract incredible value from high- resolution (sub-meter, sub-hourly or hyper-spectral) remote sensing data, but these data can be difficult to use. Correct, appropriate and competent use of such data requires skills from remote sensing and the data sciences that are rarely taught together. In pra...
It is common knowledge that the level of landscape heterogeneity may affect the performance of remote sensing based land use/land cover classification. While this issue has been studied in depth for land cover data in general, the specific relationship between the mapping accuracy and morphological characteristics of built-up surfaces has not been...
The scaling relations between city attributes and population are emergent and ubiquitous aspects of urban growth. Quantifying these relations and understanding their theoretical foundation, however, is difficult due to the challenge of defining city boundaries and a lack of historical data to study city dynamics over time and space. To address this...
Background
Access to healthcare is imperative to health equity and well-being. Geographic access to healthcare can be modeled using spatial datasets on local context, together with the distribution of existing health facilities and populations. Several population datasets are currently available, but their impact on accessibility analyses is unknow...
Historical maps provide rich information for researchers in many areas, including the social and natural sciences. These maps contain detailed documentation of a wide variety of natural and human-made features and their changes over time, such as changes in transportation networks or the decline of wetlands or forest areas. Analyzing changes over t...
To better understand the dynamics of human settlements, thorough knowledge of the uncertainty in geospatial built-up surface datasets is critical. While frameworks for localized accuracy assessments of categorical gridded data have been proposed to account for the spatial non-stationarity of classification accuracy, such approaches have not been ap...
Multiple aspects of our society are reflected in how we have transformed land through time. However, limited availability of historical-spatial data at fine granularity have hindered our ability to advance our understanding of the ways in which land was developed over the long-term. Using a proprietary, national housing and property database, which...
Current estimates of U.S. property at risk of coastal hazards and sea level rise (SLR) are staggering—evaluated at over a trillion U.S. dollars. Despite being enormous in the aggregate, potential losses due to SLR depend on mitigation, adaptation, and exposure and are highly uneven in their distribution across coastal cities. We provide the first a...
Road networks represent a key component of human settlements, such as cities, towns, and villages, that mediate pollution and congestion, as well as economic development. However, little is known about the long-term development trajectories of road networks in rural and urban settings. We leverage novel spatial data sources to reconstruct and analy...
Transportation infrastructure, such as road or railroad networks, represent a fundamental component of our civilization. For sustainable planning and informed decision making, a thorough understanding of the long-term evolution of transportation infrastructure such as road networks is crucial. However, spatially explicit, multi-temporal road networ...
Despite abundant data on the spatial distribution of contemporary human settlements, historical data on the long-term evolution of human settlements at fine spatial and temporal granularity is scarce, limiting our quantitative understanding of long-term changes of built-up areas. This is because commonly used mapping methods (e.g., computer vision)...
The level of landscape heterogeneity may affect the performance of remote sensing based land use / land cover classification. However, the relationship between mapping accuracy of built-up surfaces and morphological characteristics of built-up areas has not been analyzed explicitly, and previous studies typically rely on aggregated landscape metric...
Access to health care is imperative to health equity and well-being. Geographic access to health care can be modelled by combining different spatial datasets, among others, on the distribution of existing health facilities and populations. Several population datasets are currently available, but their impact on accessibility analyses is unknown. In...
Increasing fire impacts across North America are associated with climate and vegetation change, greater exposure through development expansion, and less-well studied but salient social vulnerabilities. We are at a critical moment in the contemporary human-fire relationship, with an urgent need to transition from emergency response to proactive meas...
Access to health care is imperative to health equity and well-being. Geographic access to health care can be modelled by combining different spatial datasets, among others, on the distribution of existing health facilities and populations. Several population datasets are currently available, but their impact on accessibility analyses is unknown. In...
Despite abundant data on the spatial distribution of contemporary human settlements, historical data on the long-term evolution of human settlements at fine spatial and temporal granularity is scarce, limiting our quantitative understanding of long-term changes of built-up areas. This is because commonly used mapping methods (e.g., image classifica...
To better understand the dynamics of human settlements, thorough knowledge of the uncertainty in geospatial built-up surface datasets is critical. While frameworks for localized accuracy assessments of categorical gridded data have been proposed to account for the spatial non-stationarity of classification accuracy, such approaches have not been ap...
Rural-urban classifications are essential for analyzing geographic, demographic, environmental, and social processes across the rural-urban continuum. Most existing classifications are, however, only available at relatively aggregated spatial scales, such as at the county scale in the United States. The absence of rurality or urbanness measures at...
Transportation infrastructure, such as road or railroad networks, represent a fundamental component of our civilization. For sustainable planning and informed decision making, a thorough understanding of the long-term evolution of transportation infrastructure such as road networks is crucial. However, spatially explicit, multi-temporal road networ...
Landscapes and human settlements evolve over long periods of time. Land change, as one of the drivers of the ecological crisis in the Anthropocene, therefore, needs to be studied with a long-term perspective. Over the past decades, a substantial body of research has accumulated in the field of land change science. The quantitative geospatial analys...
Rural America is often portrayed as a distressed and left-behind place, where the outlook for rural children is stagnant. This view of rural hardship is supported by the fact that since 1980, almost one in three rural communities have seen increases in poverty of 50 percent or more. But are such worsening conditions a typical feature of rural commu...
“Global harmonization of urbanization measures: Proceed with care”
Thousands of scanned historical topographic maps contain valuable information covering long periods of time, such as how the hydrography of a region has changed over time. Efficiently unlocking the information in these maps requires training a geospatial objects recognition system, which needs a large amount of annotated data. Overlapping geo-refer...
The increasing availability and accessibility of numerous overhead images allows us to estimate and assess the spatial arrangement of groups of geospatial target objects, which can benefit many applications, such as traffic monitoring and agricultural monitoring. Spatial arrangement estimation is the process of identifying the areas which contain t...
By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities and towns, a marked increase from today’s level of 55 percent. If the general trend is unmistakable, efforts to measure it precisely have been beset with difficulties: the criteria defining urban areas, cities and towns differ from one country to the next and can also...
Historical maps contain detailed geographic information difficult to find elsewhere covering long-periods of time (e.g., 125 years for the historical topographic maps in the US). However, these maps typically exist as scanned images without searchable metadata. Existing approaches making historical maps searchable rely on tedious manual work (inclu...
Spatially explicit, fine-grained datasets describing historical urban extents are rarely available prior to the era of operational remote sensing. However, such data are necessary to better understand long-term urbanization and land development processes and for the assessment of coupled nature–human systems (e.g., the dynamics of the wildland–urba...
We examine a key component of human settlements mediating pollution and congestion, as well as economic development: roads and their expansion in cities, towns and villages. Our analysis of road networks in more than 850 US cities and rural counties since 1900 reveals significant variations in the structure of roads both within cities and across th...
Losses from natural hazards are escalating dramatically, with more properties and critical infrastructure affected each year. Although the magnitude, intensity, and/or frequency of certain hazards has increased, development contributes to this unsustainable trend, as disasters emerge when natural disturbances meet vulnerable assets and populations....
Spatially explicit, fine-grained datasets describing historical urban extents are rarely available prior to the era of operational remote sensing. However, such data are necessary to better understand long-term urbanization and land development processes and for the assessment of coupled nature-human systems, e.g., the dynamics of the wildland-urba...
Current estimates of U.S. property at risk of coastal hazards and sea level rise (SLR) are stag-gering, evaluated at over a trillion U.S. dollars. Despite being enormous in the aggregate, po-tential losses due to SLR depend on mitigation, adaptation, and exposure and are highly uneven in their distribution across coastal cities. We provide the firs...
Rural-urban classifications are essential for analyzing geographic, demographic, environmental, or socioeconomic processes across the rural-urban continuum. However, existing county-level classifications may ignore the within-county variations of rurality, which can be problematic if the scale of interest is at the place-level or finer. Moreover, e...
Urban tree cover provides benefits to human health and well-being, but previous studies suggest that tree cover is often inequitably distributed. Here, we use National Agriculture Imagery Program digital ortho photographs to survey the tree cover inequality for Census blocks in US large urbanized areas, home to 167 million people across 5,723 munic...
Researchers in Earth and environmental science can extract incredible value from high resolution remote sensing data, but these data can be hard to use. Pain free use requires skills from remote sensing and the data sciences that are seldom taught together. In practice, many researchers teach themselves how to use high resolution remote sensing dat...
Most cities in the United States of America are thought to have followed similar development trajectories to evolve into their present form. However, data on spatial development of cities are limited prior to 1970. Here we leverage a compilation of high-resolution spatial land use and building data to examine the evolving size and form (shape and s...
The collection, processing, and analysis of remote sensing data since the early 1970s has rapidly improved our understanding of change on the Earth's surface. While satellite-based Earth observation has proven to be of vast scientific value, these data are typically confined to recent decades of observation and often lack important thematic detail....
The county scale has thus far dominated rural demographic research—this descriptive profile of small town America is unique with its place-based lens. Another important extension is the nationwide application of the Community Capitals Framework which builds on the body of research examining capitals within case studies focused on one or more commun...
With climate-driven increases in wildfires in the western U.S., it is imperative to understand how the risk to homes is also changing nationwide. Here, we quantify the number of homes threatened, suppression costs, and ignition sources for 1.6 million wildfires in the United States (U.S.; 1992–2015). Human-caused wildfires accounted for 97% of the...
The collection, processing and analysis of remote sensing data since the early 1970s has rapidly improved our understanding of change on the Earth’s surface. While satellite-based earth observation has proven to be of vast scientific value, these data are typically confined to recent decades of observation and often lack important thematic detail....
How entrenched is the spatial structure of inequality in cities? Although recent discussions provide conflicting answers to this question, the absence of long-term, longitudinal neighborhood data curtails direct examination of the issue. Focusing on the city of Denver, we develop a new strategy for analyzing neighborhood dynamics from 1940 to the p...
Over the past 200 years, the population of the United States grew more than 40-fold. The resulting development of the built environment has had a profound impact on the regional economic, demographic, and environmental structure of North America. Unfortunately, constraints on data availability limit opportunities to study long-term development patt...
Historical maps provide a rich source of information for researchers in the social and natural sciences. These maps contain detailed documentation of a wide variety of natural and human-made features and their changes over time, such as the changes in the transportation networks and the decline of wetlands. It can be labor-intensive for a scientist...
Historical maps provide a rich source of information for researchers in the social and natural sciences. These maps contain detailed documentation of a wide variety of natural and human-made features and their changes over time, such as the changes in the transportation networks and the decline of wetlands. It can be labor-intensive for a scientist...
The recognition of structures is fundamental to map generalization, furnishing structural information that assists in choosing and parameterizing generalization operators. We specifically focus on the process of recognizing groups of small polygons in geological maps as a prerequisite to subsequent aggregation or typification operators. Proximity b...
In today’s increasingly urban world, understanding the components of urban population growth is essential. While the demographic components of natural increase and migration have received the overwhelming share of attention to date, this paper addresses the effects of administrative reclassification on urban population growth as derived from census...
How have our cities evolved into what they are today? Despite strong claims regarding the forces shaping the spatial organization of cities, evidence on long-term urban change remains thin. Notably, direct testing of the regularities and rules thought to characterize long-term urban development is surprisingly rare. By leveraging new and unpreceden...
Digital map processing has been an interest in the computer science and geographic information science communities since the early 1980s. With the increase of available map scans, a variety of researchers in the natural and social sciences developed a growing interest in using historical maps in their studies. The lack of an understanding of how hi...