MTBF-33: A multi-temporal building footprint dataset for 33 U.S. counties at annual resolution (1900-2015)

We collected open and publicly available data resources from the web from administrative, county- or state-level institutions in the United States and integrated and harmonized cadastral parcel data, tax assessment data, and building footprint data for 33 counties, where building footprint data and building construction year information was available. The result of this effort is a unique dataset which we call the Multi-Temporal Building Footprint Dataset for 33 U.S. Counties (MTBF-33). MTBF-33 contains over 6.2 million building footprints including their construction year, and is available in ESRI Shapefile format, and in two spatial reference systems: (a) WGS84 (EPSG:4326), and (b) NAD1983 Albers Conic Equal Area Projection (EPSG:5070; aka ESRI:102039 or SR-ORG:7480), organized per county.
We compared the MTBF-33 dataset quantitatively to other building footprint data sources, achieving an overall F-1 score of 0.93. Moreover, we compared the MTBF-33 dataset qualitatively to urban extents from historical maps and find high levels of agreement.
The MTBF-33 dataset can be used to support historical building stock assessments, to derive retrospective depictions of built-up areas from 1900 to 2015, at fine spatial and temporal grain and can be used for data validation purposes, or to train statistical learning approaches aiming to extract historical information on human settlements from remote sensing data, historical maps, or similar data sources.

Data sources:
Boulder County (Colorado) Open Data Catalog / Florida Geographic Data Library / Hillsborough County, Florida / City of Tampa / Manatee County, Florida / Sarasota County, Florida / City of Evansville, Vanderburgh County, Indiana / Baltimore County Government, Maryland / Bureau of Geographic Information (MassGIS), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Executive Office of Technology and Security Services / City of Boston / MetroGIS, Minnesota Geospatial Commons, Minnesota Geospatial Information Office, Anoka County, Carver County, Dakota County, Hennepin County, Ramsey County, and Washington County, Minnesota / Monmouth County, New Jersey / City of New York / Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Data scraping was performed in 2016.