Dataset of building locations in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s

The aim of this study was to create a dataset of building locations in Poland from the 1970s–1980s. The source information was the historical 1:10 000 Polish topographic map. Building footprints were detected and extracted from approximately 8,500 scanned map sheets using the Mask R-CNN model implemented in Esri ArcGIS Pro software, and converted to point building locations. The dataset of building locations covers the entire country and contains approximately 11 million points representing buildings. The accuracy of the dataset was assessed manually on randomly selected map sheets. The overall accuracy is 95% (F1 = 0.98). The dataset may be used in conjunction with various contemporary land use, land cover and cadastral datasets in a broad range of applications related to long-term changes in rural and urban areas, including urban sprawl and its environmental and social consequences. It can also serve as a highly reliable reference dataset for regional or global settlement products derived, e.g., from early Landsat data.