High-resolution maps of material stock and population in Germany from 1985 to 2018

Global societal material stocks such as buildings and infrastructure accumulated rapidly within recent decades, along with population growth. Material stocks constitute the physical basis of most socio-economic activities and services, such as mobility, housing, health, or education. The dynamics of stock growth, and its relation to the population that demands those services, is an essential indicator for long-term societal resource use and patterns of emissions. The creation of societal material stock creates path dependencies for future resource use, with an important impact on how the transformation towards sustainable societies can succeed.

This dataset features detailed maps of material stock and population for Germany on a 30m grid. The data is based on recent maps of material stock and building volume (compare to Haberl et al. 2021, doi: 10.1021/acs.est.0c05642), recent and historic census data, and a time series of Landsat TM, ETM+, and OLI Earth Observation data.

Temporal extent

The data contains annual maps from 1985 to 2018.

Data format and units

Per German federal state, the data come in tiles of 30x30km. The projection is EPSG:3035. The images are compressed GeoTiff files (*.tif). There is a mosaic in GDAL Virtual format (*.vrt), which can readily be opened in most Geographic Information Systems. Please consider the generation of image pyramids before using *.vrt files.

All image data has 34 bands, where band 1 is data for 1985, and band 34 is data for 2018.

The dataset features

• population (Scaled by 100 to reduce data storage size. Divide by 100 to get people per cell)
• mass (in tons) of …
  • total material stock
    • … material stock in buildings
      • … in commercial and industrial buildings
      • … in multi-family residential buildings
      • … in single-family residential buildings
      • … in high-rise buildings
      • … in lightweight buildings
    • … material stock in road infrastructure
    • … material stock in rail infrastructure
    • … material stock in other infrastructure

Material stock in high-rise and lightweight buildings is not featured in the corresponding publication due to its overall negligible amount. It is, however, included here for completeness.

Further information

For further information, please see the publication or contact Franz Schug (fschug@wisc.edu). Visit our website to learn more about our project MAT_STOCKS - Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society.

Corresponding publication

Schug, F., Frantz, D., Wiedenhofer, D., Virág, D., Haberl, H., van der Linden, S., Hostert, P. (in rev.): High-resolution mapping of 33 years of material stock and population growth in Germany. Journal of Industrial Ecology

Funding

This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MAT_STOCKS, grant agreement No 741950).