Development of a suitability model for estimation of global urban land cover

Urban population increase and the subsequent expansion of urban areas affect both global environment and local biodiversity. A long-term perspective is required on urban expansion when discussing policies to alleviate its environmental impact. The purpose of this study is to advance the suitability method for urban expansion projection at a global scale, utilizing recent world datasets acquired through remote sensing and open source data. We develop an urban suitability model, apply it to create an urban suitability map for land grids across the world, and validate the spatial distribution of land cover errors. According to our results, 99% of the global land grids were estimated with less than 10% error in urban areas. Grids with larger error were unevenly distributed around large cities and small towns worldwide. These errors likely resulted from the application of a single universal model to the entire globe and from the setting of autoregressive factors as well. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.