A standardized dataset of built-up areas of China's cities with populations over 300,000 for the period 1990-2015

China's urbanization has attracted a lot of attention due to its unprecedented pace and intensity in terms of land, population, and economic impact. However, due to the lack of consistent and harmonized data, little is known about the patterns and dynamics of the interaction between these different aspects over the past few decades. Along with the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a standardized dataset for assessing the sustainability of urbanization in China is needed. In this paper, we used remote sensing data from multiple sources (time-series of Landsat and Sentinel images) to map the impervious surface area (ISA) at five-year intervals from 1990 to 2015 and then converted the results into a standardized dataset of the built-up area for 433 Chinese cities with 300,000 inhabitants or more. This dataset was produced following the well-established rules adopted by the United Nations (UN). Validation of the ISA maps in urban areas based on the visual interpretation of Google Earth images showed that the average overall accuracy (OA), producer's accuracy (PA) and user's accuracy (UA) were 91.24%, 92.58% and 89.65%, respectively. Comparisons with other existing urban built-up area datasets derived from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the World Bank and UN-habitat indicated that our dataset, namely the standardized urban built-up area dataset for China (SUBAD-China), provides an improved description of the spatiotemporal characteristics of the urbanization process and is especially applicable to a combined analysis of the spatial and socio-economic domains in urban areas. Potential applications of this dataset include combining the spatial expansion and demographic information provided by UN to calculate sustainable development indicators such as SDG 11.3.1. The dataset could also be used in other multidimensional syntheses related to the study of urbanization in China. The published dataset is available at http://www.doi.org/10.11922/sciencedb.j00076.00004.

Automated summary

A standardized dataset of China's urban built-up area was created using remote sensing data, providing a foundation for assessing the sustainability of urbanization. The dataset demonstrated high accuracy and improved description of the spatiotemporal characteristics of the urbanization process compared to existing datasets, making it particularly suitable for combined spatial and socio-economic analysis in urban areas.