Welcome to the Global Land Survey Impervious Mapping Project website. The focus of the GLS-IMP is to use high-resolution data to assess global urbanization for the year 2000 and 2010.
Urban areas represent one of the most important forms of land use. While these areas cover a small proportion of the Earth’s land surface, their expansion impacts hydrology, weather, resource demand, resource utilization, and emissions. These impacts are increasingly felt from local to continental and even global scales. It is imperative to develop the tools with which we can accurately measure and monitor urban expansion and its characteristics.
This project will make available a global scale percent impervious cover maps for 2000 and 2010, and a 2000-2010 urbanization ‘hot spot’ product. The processing framework developed in this project may be used to perform repeated global inventories of impervious cover in the future. These are central to a better understanding of the impact and consequences of our rapidly urbanizing planet on future cities, the land around us, and our climate.
This site is designed to inform fellow scientist and the public about the urban research we are conducting by explaining our methods used to complete our research. In addition, we will provide information on how to obtain our final products.
While this website is currently under construction we invite you to email us with any questions you may have about the project.
