Global land cover map to illustrate sparsity of urban areas

Apr 21, 2022
Created by Gary Promhouse
Export
Open Map
Description
A land cover map of the part of North America within the US 48 contiguous states and the border areas of Canada and Mexico. The Red areas are considered "artificial" here, and as urban or built up in the table. As with the global average this illustrates how small the urban in NA is relative to the total land area (612,000 sq. kn. vs 510,000,000 for the entire planet.

Note that today the average urban population for a country is below 50% is some undeveloped countries, but developed countries and the developed areas in developing countries, will generally be 70-80%, ore even higher, urbanized. The part of the earth shown on this map is almost entirely considered developed. I believe, though I have not confirmed, that even within what is not considered an urban area, the bulk of the population would still live in settlements, just ones whose population is below what is considered urban (e.g. hamlets to villages of say under 1000. In the next slide I will give an illustration using Ontario as an example.
Location
Credits
Databasis.org
Use Constraints
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License.
This map is visible to everyone

About the Map Author

Gary Promhouse
with Basis for change

I am a 68 year old male. I started my education with a degree in applied math, followed directly be a master in EE. I worked for a while as a full time employee, consultant or contractor. I stopped this when I chose to go back to do a PhD in CS. While I never did finish, I learned a vast amount...