Scientists have created the most detailed 3D map of almost all the buildings in the world.
The map, called GlobalBuildingAtlas, combines satellite imagery and machine learning to create 3D models for 97% of buildings on Earth.
The dataset, published in the open-access journal Earth System Science Data on December 1, covers 2,75 billion buildings , each of which has been mapped with floor plan and elevation at a spatial resolution of 3 meters by 3 meters.
The 3D map opens up new possibilities for disaster risk assessment, climate modeling and urban planning, according to study co-author Xiaoxiang Zhu, an Earth observation data scientist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
It could also help improve how researchers track the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals for cities and communities, Zhu says.
Conventionally, creating detailed 3D maps on a global scale has been difficult, Zhu says, because it usually requires either laser scanning or high-resolution stereoscopic images.
His team's solution was to combine deep learning with laser scanning techniques to predict building heights. The tool was trained on reference data obtained using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) from 168 cities, mainly in Europe, North America, and Oceania.
The researchers created the 3D maps from about 800.000 satellite scenes captured in 2019, using the deep learning tool to predict the height, volume and area of buildings.
The study found that Asia accounts for almost half of all mapped buildings in the world – about 1,22 billion structures. Asia also dominates the total building volume with 1,27 trillion cubic meters, reflecting rapid urbanization and dense metropolitan clusters in China, India and Southeast Asia.
Africa has the second largest number of buildings, with 540 million, but their total volume is only 117 billion cubic meters, highlighting the prevalence of small, low-rise structures.
City-scale analyses show how building volume correlates with population density and economic growth. In Europe, Finland has six times more building volume per capita than Greece. The study also highlighted that Niger’s building volume per capita is 27 times below the global average.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04036-x
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
