Bechtel, Benjamin and Alexander, Paul John and Böhner, Jürgen and Ching, Jason and Conrad, Olaf and Feddema, Johannes and Mills, Gerald and See, Linda and Stewart, Iain (2015) Mapping Local Climate Zones for a Worldwide Database of the Form and Function of Cities. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 4 (1). pp. 199-219. ISSN 2220-9964

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Abstract

Progress in urban climate science is severely restricted by the lack of useful information that describes aspects of the form and function of cities at a detailed spatial resolution. To overcome this shortcoming we are initiating an international effort to develop the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) to gather and disseminate this information in a consistent manner for urban areas worldwide. The first step in developing WUDAPT is a description of cities based on the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) scheme, which classifies natural and urban landscapes into categories based on climate-relevant surface properties. This methodology provides a culturally-neutral framework for collecting information about the internal physical structure of cities. Moreover, studies have shown that remote sensing data can be used for supervised LCZ mapping. Mapping of LCZs is complicated because similar LCZs in different regions have dissimilar spectral properties due to differences in vegetation, building materials and other variations in cultural and physical environmental factors. The WUDAPT protocol developed here provides an easy to understand workflow; uses freely available data and software; and can be applied by someone without specialist knowledge in spatial analysis or urban climate science. The paper also provides an example use of the WUDAPT project results.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0). Cite as: Bechtel, B.; Alexander, P.J.; Böhner, J.; Ching, J.; Conrad, O.; Feddema, J.; Mills, G.; See, L.; Stewart, I. Mapping Local Climate Zones for a Worldwide Database of the Form and Function of Cities. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2015, 4, 199-219
Keywords:	land cover; supervised classification; pixel-based classification; multi-temporal remote sensing; urban climate science; local climate zones; WUDAPT;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
Item ID:	8350
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi4010199
Depositing User:	Paul John Alexander
Date Deposited:	19 Jun 2017 15:54
Journal or Publication Title:	ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
Publisher:	MDPI
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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