Urban & Developed

Urban & Developed is terraPulse's urbanization dataset. It maps urban cover and its change over time as estimates of impervious surface cover: artificial surfaces such as roads, sidewalks and buildings that water cannot penetrate. terraPulse notes that impervious surfaces are indicators of economic development and raise surface and air temperatures, and that they affect stream hydrology, temperature and water quality.

The data are built from high-resolution satellite estimates of building and pavement cover, interpolated to 10- or 30-metre annual resolution using Landsat, Sentinel and other data sources. The standard layers are Impervious Surface Cover (percent of area), Urban Cover (urban or non-urban), Urban Change (gain or loss, with a probability of significance) and Development Year & Age. Each covers the globe at up to 10-metre resolution, in annual steps from 1984 to the present, with a latency of one year. Through the terraPulse Land Cover Dataset, impervious surface is also available as a 1-metre binary layer, alongside building, pavement, tree, grass/herb, bare and water classes; its history depends on where high-resolution imagery exists.

Uncertainty is reported as Root Mean Square Error for continuous layers and as class probability for categorical ones. terraPulse delivers its data by SFTP, through the terraServe API (GeoJSON, CSV, SHP or TIFF) and in the terraView dashboard. The company's founders produced the first annual, 30-metre time-series maps of impervious surface cover at the University of Maryland's Global Land Cover Facility.