The black-on-white Global Urban Footprint (GUF) map is a portrait of the human presence on Earth in 2012, to a maximum resolution of 12 m, covering even single houses.

Starting this month, the GUF 2012 dataset is freely available via ESA’s online Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP) at full spatial resolution of 12 m for scientific use, along with an easier to handle 84 m version for any non-profit use.

“Previously we just weren’t getting all the villages in rural areas,” says Thomas Esch of DLR German Aerospace Center, which produced the map. “But these might be crucial to understanding population distribution or disease vectors, for example, or assessing pressures on biodiversity.

“Such rural settlements are currently still home to almost half of the global population – around three billion people.”

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The UTEP is one of six ‘Thematic Exploitation Platforms’ (TEPs)' being developed by ESA in the frame of the Earth Observation ground segment evolution strategy. The TEPs aim at fostering the exploitation of EO data by providing an online environment for users to access information, ICT resources, and tools.

The TEPs are contributing to the creation of an European EO data ecosystem for research and business, one of the overarching objectives of ESA Earth Observation Envelope Programme.

The Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP) has now entered the pre-operations phase.

Due to a new set of products with unique precision and consistency such as the Global Urban Footprint and the TimeScan, the U-TEP will enable analysis of the large-scale transformation occurring on the Earth: the Urban Era.

If you are interested in Urban analysis, U-TEP tools and the related products, please visit the Urban TEP website.

U-TEP reached a milestone recently with the integration of some 450 000 scenes from the US Landsat-8 mission acquired between 2013 and 2015. The 500 TB was reduced to about 25 TB thanks to the TimeScan processor developed by the DLR German Aerospace Center. The resulting TimeScan Landsat 2015 product is already available on the U-TEP geobrowser.

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U-TEP is one of six Thematic Exploitation Platforms developed by ESA to serve data user communities. These cloud-based platforms provide an online environment to access information, processing tools and computing resources for collaboration. TEPs allow knowledge to be extracted from large environmental datasets produced through Europe's Copernicus programme and other Earth observation satellites.

The main goal of the Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP) is the implementation of an instrument that helps addressing key research questions and societal challenges arising from the phenomenon of global urbanization.

Therefore, the Urban TEP represents a web-based platform that allows users to effectively utilize Earth Observation (EO) imagery and existing auxiliary data (e.g., geo-data, statistics) to measure and assess key properties of the urban environment and monitor the past and future spatiotemporal development of settlements.

Key elements of the Urban TEP are the provision of easy and high performance access to EO data streams and archived data, multi-mission and multi-source data management and processing infrastructures, modular pre-processing and analysis procedures (value-adding processors), user-oriented functionalities for product and service development, validation and standardization as well as exchange and distribution of ideas, methods and thematic layers.

To maximize the relevance and societal benefit of the Urban TEP, the initiative includes a comprehensive concept for active expert knowledge and user community integration. Hence, the Urban TEP core consortium – consisting of 5 partners - is supported by a network 6 key user communities including the group of scientists conducting the Group on Earth Observation (GEO - Task SB-04 Global Urban Observation and Information), the World Bank Group, the European Environment Agency (EEA), DG Regio of the European Commission, the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP) and the City of Prague. In addition, 7 associated consultancy partners will bring in their expertise and competences in key sectors relevant for the Urban TEP development, implementation and sustainability.

Urban TEP Blog