This CONUS LCZ map readme.txt file was generated on 20200501 by Matthias Demuzere ------------------- GENERAL INFORMATION ------------------- Title of Dataset: CONUS-wide LCZ map and Training areas Principal Authors Information: Principal Investigator: Matthias Demuzere (matthias.demuzere ~at~ rub.de) Co-investigator: Steve Hankey (hankey ~at~ vt.edu) Alternate Contact: Benjamin Bechtel (benjamin.bechtel ~at~ rub.de) Summary: A Local Climate Zone map of the continental United States at a 100 m spatial resolution, derived from multiple Earth Observation datasets and expert and crowd-sourced LCZ class labels. There are 10 urban LCZ types, each associated with a set of relevant variables such that the map represent a valuable database of urban properties. => Please read the paper carefully for more details on methods, underlying datasets, quality control, accuracy, its relevance and usage notes. -------------------------- SHARING/ACCESS INFORMATION -------------------------- Licenses/restrictions placed on the data, or limitations of reuse: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Recommended citations for the data: - Demuzere, M., Hankey, S., Mills, G., Zhang, W., Lu, T., Bechtel, B. (2020). Combing expert and crowd-sourced training data to map urban form and functions for the continental US. Nature Scientific Data. - Demuzere, M., Hankey, S., Mills, G., Zhang, W., Lu, T., & Bechtel, B. (2020). CONUS-wide LCZ map and Training Areas. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11416950 Other Notes: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this data and associated documentation files, to use these data without restriction, subject to the following: - Understand that these data are created by crowd sourcing and machine learning and thus will naturally contain some errors. It comes as it is without any warranty. - The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the data. - The authors (or generically WUDAPT contributors) are acknowledged. - For scientific use, the following papers could be cited to introduce the LCZ concepts: * Stewart, I. D., & Oke, T. R. (2012). Local Climate Zones for Urban Temperature Studies. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 93(12), 1879–1900. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00019.1 * Bechtel B, Daneke C (2012) Classification of Local Climate Zones based on multiple Earth Observation data. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 5:1191-1202 * Bechtel B, Alexander PJ, Böhner J, Ching J, Conrad O, Feddema J, Mills G, See L, Stewart I (2015) Mapping Local Climate Zones for a Worldwide Database of the Form and Function of Cities. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 4:199-219 * Ching, J., Mills, G., Bechtel, B., See, L., Feddema, J., Wang, X., … Theeuwes, N. (2018). WUDAPT: An Urban Weather, Climate, and Environmental Modeling Infrastructure for the Anthropocene. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 99(9), 1907–1924. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0236.1 * Bechtel, B., Alexander, P. J., Beck, C., Böhner, J., Brousse, O., Ching, J., … Xu, Y. (2019). Generating WUDAPT Level 0 data – Current status of production and evaluation. Urban Climate, 27, 24–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2018.10.001 * Demuzere, M., Bechtel, B., & Mills, G. (2019). Global transferability of local climate zone models. Urban Climate, 27, 46–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2018.11.001 * Demuzere, M., Bechtel, B., Middel, A., & Mills, G. (2019). Mapping Europe into local climate zones. PLOS ONE, 14(4), e0214474. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214474 * Demuzere M, Kittner J, Bechtel B. LCZ Generator: A Web Application to Create Local Climate Zone Maps. Front Environ Sci. 2021;9. doi:10.3389/fenvs.2021.637455 -------------------- DATA & FILE OVERVIEW -------------------- Files and brief description: 1. CONUS_LCZ_map_NLCD_v1.0.tif This is a compressed geotif of the CONUS-wide LCZ map, with classes indicated by numbers 1-17. The table below describes the class number | official class description | official hex color. Note that LCZ classes 7 and 9 are not present. LCZ 1 | Compact highrise | '#910613' LCZ 2 | Compact midrise | '#D9081C' LCZ 3 | Compact lowrise | '#FF0A22' LCZ 4 | Open highrise | '#C54F1E' LCZ 5 | Open midrise | '#FF6628' LCZ 6 | Open lowrise | '#FF985E' LCZ 7 | Lightweight low-rise | '#FDED3F' LCZ 8 | Large lowrise | '#BBBBBB' LCZ 9 | Sparsely built | '#FFCBAB' LCZ 10 | Heavy Industry | '#565656' LCZ 11 (A) | Dense trees | '#006A18' LCZ 12 (B) | Scattered trees | '#00A926' LCZ 13 (C) | Bush, scrub | '#628432' LCZ 14 (D) | Low plants | '#B5DA7F' LCZ 15 (E) | Bare rock or paved | '#000000' LCZ 16 (F) | Bare soil or sand | '#FCF7B1' LCZ 17 (G) | Water | '#656BFA' Other characteristics: - Projection: Albers Conic Equal Area projection (matching the projection of the NLCD maps - https://www.mrlc.gov/viewer/) - Spatial Resolution: 100 m - Representative for 2017 - Overall average accuracies (%): OA | OAu | OAbu | OAw (see paper for acronyms) *pixel-based: 80.0 | 79.5 | 96.0 | 94.1 *city hold-out: 47.5 | 52.2 | 87.0 | 83.8 2. CONUS_LCZ_map_NLCD_v1.0_epsg4326.tif Same as CONUS_LCZ_map_NLCD_v1.0.tif, but using the the World Geodetic System 1984 (EPSG:4326) projection 3. TAs_USA_EX_MTurk_NLCD_v1.0.zip Zip file that contains a shapefile with all original Expert (EX) and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) Training Areas (TAs). These TAs did not undergo any of the pre-processing steps described in Demuzere et al. (2020). Attribute Table: - 'City' : Name of the city, only provided for the EX data - 'Class' : the LCZ class number (1 to 17) - 'Country': USA - 'Year' : Year for which the training areas are representative - 'Source' : EX or MTurk 4. cmap_Qgis_WUDAPT_LCZ.txt A QGIS (https://qgis.org/) generated LCZ Color Map Export File to display the geotif in the corresponding LCZ colors. 5. CONUS_LCZ_map_NLCD_v1.0.qgz A QGIS (https://qgis.org/) package file that displays the LCZ map together with the appropriate colors. When opening the project file, please adjust the filepath pointing to the CONUS_LCZ_map_NLCD_v1.0.tif file. Tested on QGIS > 3.12 6. CONUS_LCZ_map_NLCD_v1.0.mpk An ArcGIS (https://www.arcgis.com/) package file that displays the LCZ map together with the appropriate colors. Just drag and drop the file into ArcMap's map window to open it. If there are there multiple versions of the dataset, list the file updated, when and why update was made: v1.0: initial release of the data (20200702) v2.0: Adding LCZ map in EPSG 4326