Built-up area (WSF Tracker)
Buildings detected by satellite at 10 m, every six months from July 2016 to January 2026, from the World Settlement Footprint (WSF) Tracker of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and MindEarth.
Method
The WSF Tracker classifies Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical imagery into built-up and not built-up at 10 m, and records for each pixel the half-year in which it was first detected as built-up. The first epoch is 1 July 2016 and each later one adds six months; the latest is 1 January 2026. The Haiti extent is read from the public GeoZarr store on Source Cooperative, clipped to the OCHA department boundaries, and published two ways. The download is the native 10 m grid in WGS 84, one band, where 0 means no built-up area detected and 1 to 20 is the epoch index. The map draws the same values warped to the web-mercator zoom-14 grid. When zoomed out, a block of pixels draws as built-up once a set share of it is built, and that share is chosen for each zoom level so the built-up fraction on screen stays within about 15% of the fraction at 10 m. National and department areas come from the WSF statistics API, whose department boundaries differ from OCHA's. Summed on the OCHA boundaries, the raster agrees with the API within 1% nationally and within 4% for eight departments, while Grand'Anse reads 19% lower in the API and Sud 8% higher. Commune figures are summed from the raster. The most recent half-years show less new building in every country the dataset covers, so compare recent periods across places; set against earlier years they overstate any slowdown. Built-up area counts buildings, not people, and does not show families who moved into existing housing. Cite as World Settlement Footprint (WSF) Tracker, German Aerospace Center (DLR) and MindEarth, data provider MindEarth, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20424537, CC BY 4.0.
- License
- CC-BY-4.0
- Format
- GeoTIFF
- Last updated
- 2026-09-23