Global Urban Built-up Area Dataset (GUBAD) for Cities with Populations Exceeding 300,000 (2000–2025)

The Global Urban Built-up Area Dataset (GUBAD) provides 30 m resolution urban built-up area (UBA) maps for 1,611 global cities with populations exceeding 300,000, covering six epochs: 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2025. UBA was derived from impervious surface areas (ISA) extracted via Random Forest classification of Landsat and Sentinel-1/2 imagery, converted to functional urban boundaries using UN urban agglomeration definitions with population-density and contiguity constraints. The dataset includes: (1) vectorized UBA polygons (Esri Shapefile, EPSG:4326); (2) city-level attribute tables with population records, UBA area estimates, and SDG 11.3.1 indicators; and (3) ISO 19115-compliant metadata. GUBAD enables reproducible monitoring of urban expansion and SDG 11.3.1 assessment at the global city scale. All data are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Source code and documentation are available at the GitHub repository linked below.