Three-dimensional building and mobility infrastructure of the CONUS

Humanity's role in changing the face of the earth is a long-standing concern, as is the human domination of ecosystems. Geologists are debating the introduction of a new geological epoch, the 'anthropocene', as humans are 'overwhelming the great forces of nature'. In this context, the accumulation of artefacts, i.e., human-made physical objects, is a pervasive phenomenon. Variously dubbed 'manufactured capital', 'technomass', 'human-made mass', 'in-use stocks' or 'socioeconomic material stocks', they have become a major focus of sustainability sciences in the last decade. Globally, the mass of socioeconomic material stocks now exceeds 10e14 kg, which is roughly equal to the dry-matter equivalent of all biomass on earth. It is doubling roughly every 20 years, almost perfectly in line with 'real' (i.e. inflation-adjusted) GDP. In terms of mass, buildings and infrastructures (here collectively called 'built structures') represent the overwhelming majority of all socioeconomic material stocks.

This dataset features intermediate mapping results for estimating material stocks in the CONUS (see related identifiers) on a 10m grid based on high resolution Earth Observation data (Sentinel-1 + Sentinel-2), Microsoft building footprints, NLCD Impervious data, and crowd-sourced geodata (OSM). These data may also be useful on their own.

Provided layers @10m resolution
- Building height
- Building type
- Building area
- Impervious fraction
- street, and rail area
- Building and street climate zones
- County zones
- State masks
- EQUI7 correction factors

Spatial extent
This dataset covers the whole CONUS. 

Temporal extent
The maps are representative for ca. 2018.

Data format
The data are organized in 100km x 100km tiles (EQUI7 grid), and mosaics are provided.

Further information
For further information, please see the main publication.
A web-visualization of the resulting dataset is available here.
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.

Publication
D. Frantz, F. Schug, D. Wiedenhofer, A. Baumgart, D. Virág, S. Cooper, C. Gómez-Medina, F. Lehmann, T. Udelhoven, S. van der Linden, P. Hostert, and H. Haberl (2023): Unveiling patterns in human dominated landscapes through mapping the mass of US built structures. Nature Communications 14, 8014. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43755-5

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

Acknowledgments
We thank the European Space Agency and the European Commission for freely and openly sharing Sentinel imagery; USGS for the National Land Cover Database; Microsoft for Building Footprints; Geofabrik and all contributors for OpenStreetMap.This dataset was partly produced on EODC - we thank Clement Atzberger for supporting the generation of this dataset by sharing disc space on EODC, and Wolfgang Wagner for granting access to preprocessed Sentinel-1 data.