Surface Water Loss map and Urbanization map

Surface water are severly affected by human activities, and here we defined two novel datasets, both derived from remote sensing data, to investigate the influence of urban areas on the spatial distribution of surface water loss locations across the watersheds in the United States: the Surface Water Loss map and the Urbanization map.

The Surface Water Loss map is a binary map that identifies the geographical location of surface water depletion hotspots. It was obtained from the Surface Water Transitions layer of the Global Surface Water dataset (Pekel et al., 2016). Pixels values in the map are as follows: 0 = No surface water loss, 1 = Surface water loss hotspots.

The Urbanization map is a binary map that shows the presence of built-up areas. It was generated from the GHS-BUILT layer from the Global Human Settlement dataset (Corbane et al., 2019). Pixels values in the map are as follows: 0 = No urban area, 1 = Urban area.References:Corbane et al. (2019). Automated global delineation of human settlements from 40 years of Landsat satellite data archives. Big Earth Data 3, 140-169, https://doi.org/10.1080/20964471.2019.1625528

Pekel et al. (2016). High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes. Nature, 540, 418-422, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature20584