The UrbanWatch database is provided for personal use at no cost for academic, research, and/or teaching purposes. A database release agreement must be agreed to before these licensed data can be released. The Laboratory for Remote Sensing and Environmental Change (LRSEC) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte must be acknowledged on any derivative product, whether printed or electronic, including, for example, a printed map, a raster, or vector graphic, a web-based application, etc.
UrbanWatch is built on strong collaborations. Partnerships involve both data hosting as well as technology research and development. If you are interested in collaborating with LRSEC on data hosting, R&D, or other activities, please contact us.
Below a Google Map will be loaded for you to choose the city of interest for data downloading. To facilitate data downloading, we have divided each city into multiple grids (approximately 6000 × 7000 meters each) and allow the users to select the interested grids from a preview image of a city using IDs. All maps are in GeoTIFF format and have embedded georeferencing information. The value of each pixel in the maps corresponds to a specific LCLU class, i.e., red-building, gray-road, purple-parking lot, dark green-tree canopy, light green-grass/shrub, blue-water, yellow-agriculture, dark red-barren, and white-others.
A nine-class urban classification scheme with diverse geographic patches
Category
Color
Classification Description
Building
A human-made structure with a roof (various sizes, shapes, colors, and materials) and walls across commercial, industrial, institutional, and residential areas,such as office buildings, stores, single family houses, townhouses, and condos.
Road
A long, narrow stretch with a leveled or paved surface that has specific orientation, length, and width. It differs from building and parking lot with its unique feature of connectivity,such as highway, bridge, sidewalk, driveway, railway, rural pathway, and airport runway.
Parking Lot
A cleared area intended for parking vehicles such as an on-the-ground or a surface parking lot. It differs from building and road with its unique feature of vehicle presence and/or surface markings.
Tree Canopy
Individual trees or tree patches representing woody vegetation typically taller than 2 m, such as trees in yards, along streets and utility corridors, and in parks and nature reserves.
Grass/Shrub
Small-sized perennial woody plants or herbaceous plants with height lower than 2 m, such as bushes, lawns, roadway medians, and grasslands.
Agriculture
Land for cultivating crops, such as corn, wheat, and soy, as well as fallow plots.
Water
Areas where water is predominantly present throughout the year, such as rivers, ponds, lakes, oceans, flooded plains, canals, streams, bays, estuaries, and swimming pools.
Barren
Areas of rock, sand or soil with very sparse to no vegetation all year round, such as exposed rock or soil, desert, dunes, dry salt flats, dried lake beds, clay, mud, quarries, golf course sand traps, mine lands, and construction site, etc.
Others
All other land cover/use not assigned to the above eight classes, such as outdoor tennis/basketball courts with artificial turf or acrylic surface, transmission towers, and areas covered by disturbed soils/sands without uniformed structures.
