In terms of the space cities occupy, urbanization appears as a minor land transformation. However, it permanently modifies land’s ecological functions, altering its carbon, energy, and water fluxes. It is therefore necessary to develop a land cover characterization at fine spatial and temporal scales to capture urbanization’s effects on surface fluxes.

Presented maps provide consistent quantification of forest cover dynamic within Eastern Europe from 1985 to 2012 based on Landsat image archive. All datasets provided in Albers Equal Area projection with pixel size 30x30m. Forest cover dynamics types shows areas of stable forest/non-forest and certain forest dynamics (forest cover loss, forest cover gain, gain followed by loss, etc.). Forest cover loss date provided by interval (1986-1988, 1989-2000, 2001-2006, 2007-2012). In case of repeated forest clearing, only the date of first loss event is recorded.

This is the website of the IDS project Mega urban Changes and Impacts in the Decade of 2000s.

This data portal contains socioeconomic and biophysical data from the Mongolian region.

This dataset provides a current, consistent, and seamless map of urban, built‐up and settled areas using multiple classifications of MODIS time series data. The maps are currently provided for each of the 17 countries in the East and South East Asian region, as well as for the region as a whole at 250 m, 500 m, and 1 km spatial resolution. For more details, refer to the read me files in the downloaded data.

The 2010 Urban Vegetated Fraction for North America dataset is based on Landsat observations and estimates vegetated fraction of the urbanized areas of North America through a standardized spectral mixture model applied to the Global Land Survey 2010 dataset. Since land cover change from urban to rural areas takes place through a continuum gradient information from the VIIRS Day/Night Band was used to isolate populated agglomerations.

The Global Forest Change Product provides results from time-series analysis of 654,178 Landsat images in characterizing forest extent and change product. For definitions of Forest extent and change refer to Hansen et al., 2013.