Description: This global World Settlement Footprint (WSF) was created using Sentinel-1 und 2 imagery from the years 2016 to 2026 and developed through collaboration between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and MindEarth, with support from a dedicated initiative of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Global Development Assistance (GDA) programme. It captures settlement changes worldwide every six months with a spatial resolution of 10m x 10m. The world's built-up footprint is expanding rapidly, but this growth is not occurring uniformly. In many regions, new settlements, infrastructure, and economic activities are increasingly emerging in areas exposed to environmental and geophysical hazards, while elsewhere settlement dynamics reflect reconstruction, displacement, or broader socio-economic change. Understanding these patterns requires more than a static view of the built environment. Timely information on where settlements emerge and how they evolve is essential for assessing exposure, planning infrastructure and services, supporting disaster risk reduction, and informing policy and development decisions. The WSF Tracker provides a globally consistent foundation for these analyses, enabling users to combine settlement dynamics with hazard, population, infrastructure, and socio-economic datasets across local, regional, and global scales. By analysing satellite observations from the European Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions and combining it with auxilary data likes dems and roand networks the dataset provides a spatially detailed and frequently updated picture of built-up area development at a scale that has so far been largely unavailable globally.
Global identifier:
Uuid(
464df22d-c9b6-4718-a507-b11181af855b,
)
Tags: Messstellennetz ? Entwicklungszusammenarbeit ? Infrastrukturplanung ? Katastrophenvorsorge ? Siedlungsentwicklung ? Wirtschaft ? Gebaute Umwelt ?
Bounding boxes: -180° .. 180° x -60° .. 78°
License: Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0
Language: Englisch/English
Issued: 2026-06-11
Modified: 2026-10-26
Last harvest: 13.11.2026 01:50
Update frequency: as needed
Accessed 4 times.