Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL

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Edition: Mon 29.4., 17:00
Avalanche Bulletin

Urban Sprawl Metrics tool (USM)

USM-Tool (old)

Example of a landscape in Switzerland with built-up areas (near Zurich). The USM Toolset can be used to measure the degree of urban sprawl of this landscape (photo: J. Jaeger, 2015).

The Urban Sprawl Metrics (USM) Toolset allows to intuitively apply the method of Weighted Urban Proliferation. By adapting the parameters size of residential area, dispersion of settlement areas and land use, urban sprawl can be analysed and objectively discussed in the planning phase.

The USM Toolset is a  GIS application and was developed using Python and C+ languages. This tool is freely available under the Creative Commons Licence and can  be downloaded here.

With certain ArcGIS versions and hardware constellations no calculation can be performed. Therefore, we recommend the Landscape Metrics Tools (see below).

Landscape Metrics Tools (new)

This is a modification to the ZonalMetrics ArcGIS toolbox developed by J. Adamczyk and D. Tiede. This tool was developed in the course of the master thesis of Simon Wetzel with the support of U. Walz (HTW Dresden) and M. Behnisch (IOER Dresden). The part of the tool responsible for urban sprawl was then checked and improved in collaboration with WSL.

(Kopie 1)