Mapping land use in Mexico City and other urban areas can be a key tool to help cities manage their resources and improve quality of life. Photo by Nitin Badjatia/Unsplash
Remote sensing has revolutionized how we measure and understand the Earth. We can now track deforestation across the globe, predict end-of-season crop yields and identify wildfires in near real-time. But exploration into its possibilities for urban areas has only just begun. Conventional land cover maps, which categorize the surface of the Earth into groupings like “forest” or “water” or “tundra,” often lump urban areas into a single category, like “urban” or “built-up.” This is useful for mapping urban extent generally, but does not capture the complexity of urban areas. Mapping land