Building types map of Germany

This dataset features a map of building types for Germany on a 10m grid based on Sentinel-1A/B and Sentinel-2A/B time series. A random forest classification was used to map the predominant type of buildings within a pixel. We distinguish single-family residential buildings, multi-family residential buildings, commercial and industrial buildings and lightweight structures. Building types were predicted for all pixels where building density > 25 %. Please refer to the publication for details.

Temporal extent

Sentinel-2 time series data are from 2018. Sentinel-1 time series data are from 2017.

Data format

The data come in tiles of 30x30km (see shapefile). The projection is EPSG:3035. The images are compressed GeoTiff files (*.tif). Metadata are located within the Tiff, partly in the FORCE domain. There is a mosaic in GDAL Virtual format (*.vrt), which can readily be opened in most Geographic Information Systems. Building type values are categorical, according to the following scheme:

0 – No building

1 – Commercial and industrial buildings

2 – Single-family residential buildings

3 – Lightweight structures

4 – Multi-family residential buildings

Further information

For further information, please see the publication or contact Franz Schug (franz.schug@geo.hu-berlin.de).
A web-visualization of this dataset is available here.

Publication

Schug, F., Frantz, D., van der Linden, S., & Hostert, P. (2021). Gridded population mapping for Germany based on building density, height and type from Earth Observation data using census disaggregation and bottom-up estimates. PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249044

Acknowledgements

The dataset was generated by FORCE v. 3.1 (paper, code), which is freely available software under the terms of the GNU General Public License v. >= 3. Sentinel imagery were obtained from the European Space Agency and the European Commission.

Funding
This dataset was produced with funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MAT_STOCKS, grant agreement No 741950).