World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2015

The World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2015 is a 10m (0.32 arc sec) resolution binary mask outlining the 2015 global settlement extent derived by jointly exploiting multitemporal Sentinel-1 radar and Landsat-8 optical satellite imagery. The archive is organized for download in 306 GeoTIFF files (EPSG4326 projection, deflate compression) each one referring to a portion of 10x10 degree size (~1110x1110km) whose upper-left and lower-right corner coordinates are specified in the file name [e.g., the tile WSF2015_v1_EPSG4326_e010_n60_e020_n50.tif covers the area between (10E;60N) and (20E;50N)]. A virtual mosaic file (i.e., WSF2015_v1_EPSG4326.vrt) is also provided which allows visualizing the global product at once on most diffused GIS platforms (e.g., ArcGIS, QGIS, MapInfo). Settlements are associated with value 255; all other pixels are associated with value 0.