Global Urban City Boundaries (311 Cities) — GeoPackage for "Global Weakening of Urban Vegetative Cooling"

This dataset provides polygon city-boundary geometries for 311 global cities used in the manuscript “Global Weakening of Urban Vegetative Cooling.” Boundaries were compiled from public sources and consolidated into a single GeoPackage (CITIES_global_veg_cooling.gpkg) to support reproducible extraction of satellite and reanalysis variables (e.g., Landsat NDVI/LST, TerraClimate, ERA5-Land, GHSL, GPW, YCEO SUHI). City boundaries are delimited to 1990 urban extents as detailed in the manuscript. Contents One layer per city (vector polygons); layer names follow the city name. Geometry type: polygon/multipolygon. Coordinate reference system (CRS): Goode Homolosine (Land), WKID: 54052 Attribute fields: minimally include a city name; additional attributes may include country/region and source notes (see layer metadata). Intended use Masking and zonal statistics for remote-sensing and climate products in Google Earth Engine or desktop GIS. Reproducing the city-level medians and trends reported in the manuscript and repository. Provenance & processing Source shapefiles were consolidated and written to GeoPackage via ArcGIS Pro/ArcPy, preserving city-level boundaries; minor topological fixes (if required) were applied by standard GIS tools. No simplification of geometry was performed. Related materials Analysis code (GEE + MATLAB), README, and workflow: see the companion GitHub repository for “Global Weakening of Urban Vegetative Cooling (1990–2024).” Cite the original boundary sources where noted in layer metadata if you reuse the geometries independently of the manuscript. Versioning This is the initial release for peer review and reproduction. Future updates may add/rename layers or refine attributes; use the Zenodo concept DOI to reference the latest version. Contact Maintainer: Dion Kucera, University of California, Riverside (corresponding author).