Leveraging SDGSAT-1 data for exploring the interactions of nighttime lights and human settlement structure at high spatial resolution

To better understand how wildfires threaten and affect human settlements and to model the effects of nuclear war and other hazards, detailed data on burnable materials of the built environment are crucial, but have not been available. COMBUST aims to fill this gap and provides estimates of the combustible mass of building materials, building contents, gas stations, refineries, and personal vehicles for the conterminous United States, at high spatial resolution and over time from 1975 to 2020.

Historical, fine-grained geospatial datasets on built-up areas are rarely available, constraining studies of urbanization, settlement evolution, or the dynamics of human–environment interactions to recent decades. In order to provide such historical data, we used publicly available cadastral building data for Spain and created a series of gridded surfaces, measuring age, physical, and land-use-related features of the built environment in Spain and the evolution of settlements from 1900 to 2020.