Preliminary Assessment of the Global Urban Footprint and the Global Human Settlement Layer for the city of Milan

Abstract

Two new global urban products have recently appeared: the Global Urban Footprint (GUF) and the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL). This paper evaluates the GUF and GHSL for the city of Milan, Italy through comparison with two European Union (EU) land use/cover reference products, namely the Urban Atlas and LUCAS. The results demonstrate that the GUF and GHSL are very similar to each other and, with some exceptions, show overall good agreement with the reference datasets. This study will be extended to other European cities in the future.