Department of Environment, Laboratory of Hydrology and Water Management, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Geography, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
PLoS One. 2019 Apr 24;14(4):e0214474. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214474. eCollection 2019.
Cities are major drivers of environmental change at all scales and are especially at risk from the ensuing effects, which include poor air quality, flooding and heat waves. Typically, these issues are studied on a city-by-city basis owing to the spatial complexity of built landscapes, local topography and emission patterns. However, to ensure knowledge sharing and to integrate local-scale processes with regional and global scale modelling initiatives, there is a pressing need for a world-wide database on cities that is suited for environmental studies. In this paper we present a European database that has a particular focus on characterising urbanised landscapes. It has been derived using tools and techniques developed as part of the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) project, which has the goal of acquiring and disseminating climate-relevant information on cities worldwide. The European map is the first major step toward creating a global database on cities that can be integrated with existing topographic and natural land-cover databases to support modelling initiatives.
城市是各个尺度环境变化的主要驱动因素，尤其容易受到随之而来的影响，包括空气质量差、洪水和热浪。通常，由于建成景观的空间复杂性、局部地形和排放模式，这些问题都是逐个城市进行研究的。然而，为了确保知识共享，并将地方尺度的过程与区域和全球尺度的建模倡议相结合，非常需要一个适合环境研究的全球性城市数据库。在本文中，我们提出了一个特别关注城市景观特征的欧洲数据库。它是使用作为世界城市数据库和访问门户工具（WUDAPT）项目一部分开发的工具和技术得出的，该项目的目标是获取和传播全球城市的气候相关信息。该欧洲地图是创建一个可与现有地形和自然土地覆盖数据库集成以支持建模倡议的全球性城市数据库的第一步。
