From space to the eye: Effective visual communication of earth-observation derived urbanization trends using the Global Human Settlement Layer

The steadily increasing amount of available Earth observation and other geospatial data provides unprecedented opportunities to measure, monitor, and understand natural, environmental, anthropogenic and social processes. However, to maximise the impact of space-based and other data on society, effective ways to extract, integrate, summarise and communicate the information contained in these sheer data volumes are needed. Herein, we focus on the latter of these components: communication of trends derived from Earth observation data by means of data visualisation. Specifically, we highlight how settlement and population dynamics, urbanisation patterns and land development processes can be visually represented to effectively communicate relevant information to a wide range of audiences, ranging from scientists to planners, policymakers and to the general public. The underlying data has been generated by the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) project of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) by leveraging and integrating vast amounts of global remote sensing data from the Landsat and Copernicus Sentinel-2 missions to derive spatio-temporal gridded data measuring the distribution and dynamics of the built environment, settlements and human population from 1975 onwards.

UHL Johannes H.;  CARIOLI Alessandra;  EHRLICH Daniele;  KEMPER Thomas; 

2026-02-27

Publications Office of the European Union

JRC145535

78-92-68-31935-2 (online),   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC145535,   

10.2760/2119408 (online),