GeoLayers.Administrative boundaries
The administrative boundaries are legally documented and attributed jurisdictional boundaries. They define the rights, responsibilities, and interests on the land. They provide a sub-division of the world into different entities at multiple levels: national and subnational.
We need administrative boundaries at multiple levels for every UrbanShift city in order to:
- Extract data layers from global datasets based on the geographical extent of the city
- Provide indicators aggregated at different geographical entities inside the city
Two datasources have identified to extrat the administrative boundaries of UrbanShift cities:
| Data source | Description |
|---|---|
| geoBoundaris database | The geoBoundaries global database is an online, open license resource of boundaries for every country in the world. We currently track approximately 300,000 boundaries across 199 entities, including all 195 UN member states, Greenland, Taiwan, Niue, and Kosovo. All boundaries are available to view or download in common file formats, including shapefiles. It is produced and maintained by the William & Mary geoLab since 2017. The code source of geoBoundaries is provided in this github repos. |
| GADM database | GADM provides maps and spatial data for all countries and their sub-divisions. Only national and one subnational levels are provided. |
The geoBoundaries solution provides a complete database for extracting the administrative boundaries needed for UrbanShift by download or by querying their API. You can find here an exploratory report describing the content of this database and the method to extract the geojson files corresponding to administrative boundaries.
- Download the geoBoundaries database (version 3_0_0) for the whole countries containing UrbanShift cities (
ARG,BRA,CHN,COL,CRI,ETH,IDN,IND,KEN,MAR,MEX,RWA,SLE,TUR,UGA) in Google Earth Engine assets (Link to the Asset) - Build a java library (cities360) enabling the extraction of the different administrative boundaries for a list of cities. (Link to use GEE script using cities360)
- Extract administrative boundaries of UrbanShift cities and store geojson files in .. (Link to use GEE script using cities360)
- Description of how the library works
- Description of the output data