Material stock map of 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 a detailed map of material stocks in the CONUS on a 10m grid based on high resolution Earth Observation data (Sentinel-1 + Sentinel-2), crowd-sourced geodata (OSM) and material intensity factors.

Spatial extent
This dataset covers the whole CONUS. Due to upload constraints, detailed data were split into 7 regions and were uploaded into sub-repositories - see related identifiers. (This repository holds aggregated values for the whole CONUS)

• Great Plains
• Mid West
• North East
• Rocky Mountains
• South
• South West
• West Coast

Temporal extent
The map is representative for ca. 2018.

Data format
The data are organized by states. Within each state, data are split into 100km x 100km tiles (EQUI7 grid), and mosaics are provided.

Within each tile, images for area, volume, and mass at 10m spatial resolution are provided. Units are m², m³, and t, respectively. Each metric is split into buildings, other, rail and street (note: In the paper, other, rail, and street stocks are subsumed to mobility infrastructure). Each category is further split into subcategories (e.g. building types).

Additionally, a grand total of all stocks is provided at multiple spatial resolutions and units, i.e.

• t at 10m x 10m
• kt at 100m x 100m
• Mt at 1km x 1km
• Gt at 10km x 10km

For each state, mosaics of all above-described data are provided in GDAL VRT format, which can readily be opened in most Geographic Information Systems. File paths are relative, i.e. DO NOT change the file structure or file naming. 

Additionally, the grand total mass per state is tabulated for each county in mass_grand_total_t_10m2.tif.csv. County FIPS code and the ID in this table can be related via FIPS-dictionary_ENLOCALE.csv.

Material layers
Note that material-specific layers are not included in this repository because of upload limits. Only the totals are provided (i.e. the sum over all materials). However, these can easily be derived by re-applying the material intensity factors from (see related identifiers):

A. Baumgart, D. Virág, D. Frantz, F. Schug, D. Wiedenhofer, Material intensity factors for buildings, roads and rail-based infrastructure in the United States. Zenodo (2022), doi:10.5281/zenodo.5045337.

Further information
For further information, please see the publication.
A web-visualization of this 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). Workflow development was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—Project-ID 414984028-SFB 1404.

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.