Dataset for: Quantifying the geographic distribution of building coverage across the US for urban sustainability studies

A complete building coverage area dataset (i.e. area occupied by building structures, excluding other built surfaces such as roads, parking lots, and public parks) at the level of census block groups for the contiguous United States (CONUS). The dataset was assembled based on an ensemble prediction of nonlinear hierarchical models to account for spatial heterogeneities in the distribution of built surfaces across different urban communities. Percentage of impervious land and housing density were used as predictors of the estimated area of buildings and cross-validation results showed that the product estimated area represented by buildings with a mean error of 0.049 %.