Search

The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) project has grown out of the need for better information on the form and function of cities globally. Cities are described using Local Climate Zones (LCZ), which are associated with a range of key urban climate model parameters and thus can serve as inputs to high resolution urban climate models. We refer to this as level 0 data for each city. The LCZ level 0 product is produced using freely available Landsat imagery, crowdsourced training areas from the community, and the open source SAGA software. This paper outlines the protocol by which LCZ maps generated by different members of the community are produced and evaluated. In particular, the quality assessment comprises cross-validation, review, and cross-comparison with other data sets. To date, the results from the different quality assessments show that the LCZ maps are generally of moderate quality, i.e. 50–60% overall accuracy (OA), but this is much higher when considering all built-up classes together or using weights that take the morphological and climatic similarity of certain classes into account. The training data contributed by researchers from around the world also vary in quality and in the interpretation of the landscape, which affects the final quality of the LCZ maps. The acceptable level of quality needed will depend heavily on the application of the data. However, initial modelling studies that use the level 0 products as inputs showed improved performance in simulating the urban climate when replacing the default surface descriptions with the WUDAPT level 0 data. This is also promising for the application of level 0 data in regional and global climate and weather models and supports the assumption that the current level 0 products are already of sufficient quality for certain applications. Moreover, there are various ongoing developments to improve the methods used to produce LCZ maps and their accuracy.

This article describes the design of a new model-based assessment framework to identify and analyse possible future trajectories of agricultural development and their environmental consequences within the states of Mato Grosso and Pará in Southern Amazonia, Brazil. The objective is to provide a tool for improving the information basis for scientists and policy makers regarding the effects of global change and national environmental policies on land-use change and the resulting impacts on the loss of natural vegetation, greenhouse gas emissions, hydrological processes, and soil erosion within the region. For this purpose, the framework combines the regional land-use models, LandSHIFT and alucR, the farm-level model, MPMAS, and the MONICA crop model, with a set of environmental impact models that are operating at the regional and watershed levels. As a first application of the framework, four scenarios with the time horizon 2030 were specified and analysed. Future land-use change will strongly depend on the interplay between the production of agricultural commodities, the agricultural intensification in terms of increasing crop yields and pasture biomass productivity, and the enforcement of environmental laws and policies. On the regional level, the scenarios with the highest increase in agricultural production in combination with weak law enforcement (Trend and Illegal Intensification) generated the highest losses in natural vegetation due to the expansion of agricultural area as well as the highest greenhouse gas emissions. Also, at the watershed level, these scenarios are characterised by the highest changes in river discharge and soil erosion that might lead to a further decline in soil fertility in the long term. Moreover, the analysis of the Sustainable Development scenario indicates that a shift in agricultural production patterns from livestock to crop cultivation, together with effective law enforcement, can effectively reduce land-use change and its negative

Progress in urban climate science is severely restricted by the lack of useful information that describes aspects of the form and function of cities at a detailed spatial resolution. To overcome this shortcoming we are initiating an international effort to develop the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) to gather and disseminate this information in a consistent manner for urban areas worldwide. The first step in developing WUDAPT is a description of cities based on the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) scheme, which classifies natural and urban landscapes into categories based on climate-relevant surface properties. This methodology provides a culturally-neutral framework for collecting information about the internal physical structure of cities. Moreover, studies have shown that remote sensing data can be used for supervised LCZ mapping. Mapping of LCZs is complicated because similar LCZs in different regions have dissimilar spectral properties due to differences in vegetation, building materials and other variations in cultural and physical environmental factors. The WUDAPT protocol developed here provides an easy to understand workflow; uses freely available data and software; and can be applied by someone without specialist knowledge in spatial analysis or urban climate science. The paper also provides an example use of the WUDAPT project results.