[Buildings] Coverage maps

[calebrob6]

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Is there a way to estimate whether or not a given location has Building coverage? Alternatively, is there a list of areas that are known to have incomplete or poor coverage? (e.g. Valencia, Spain or most of China)

Dependency with other categories, if any.

No response

[jenningsanderson]

Great question, @calebrob6.

Determining building coverage or completeness is a complex task. A proper analysis should also compare building counts to population density as well, that said — if you want a general idea of Overture building coverage, here's a script you can run in DuckDB that can produce a basic coverage map:

INSTALL h3 FROM community;
LOAD h3;
COPY(
  SELECT
    h3_latlng_to_cell_string(bbox.ymin, bbox.xmin, 7) as h3,
    count(1) AS buliding_count
  FROM read_parquet('s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2024-11-13.0/theme=buildings/type=building/*')
  WHERE bbox.xmin BETWEEN -10.18 AND 3.48
    AND bbox.ymin BETWEEN 35.89 AND 43.99
  GROUP BY 1
) TO 'spain_buildings_h3_density.csv';

The resulting file can be loaded directly into kepler.gl for a quick building density map of Spain:

(Map data from OpenStreetMap via Overture Maps)

[calebrob6]

Thanks @jenningsanderson -- I was getting at what you are calling "completeness" I think (cool visualization by the way 😄). I was imagining the current coverage map diffed with coarse building density (maybe a dataset like GHSL https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/).