GRID3 South Sudan Settlement Extents Version 01, Alpha

The settlement extents are a derived data set utilizing the Digitize Africa building footprints to create the GRID3 South Sudan settlement extents database.

The building footprint layer was from the "Ecopia Landbase Africa powered by Maxar", website - "DigitizeAfrica.ai". The data was produced by Ecopia Tech Corporation, and Maxar Technologies, Inc. The layer covers the country of South Sudan.

The GRID3 South Sudan settlement extents characterised building density into three (3) classes: built-up areas (bua_extents), small settlement areas (ssa_extents), and hamlets (hamlet_extents) (Inuwa,2014). These three classes of settlement agglomerations are presented below:

Built-up areas (BUAs) A built-up area (BUA) is generally an area of urbanisation with moderately-todensely-spaced buildings and a visible grid of streets and blocks. Built up areas are characterized by contours with an area greater than or equal to 400,000 meters square that maintains a building density of thirteen or more across the entire area.

Small Settlements (SSAs) A small settlement (SSA) is a settled area of permanently inhabited structures and compounds of roughly a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants. The housing pattern in SSAs is an assemblage of family compounds adjoining other similar habitations. Small settlement areas are characterized by having 50 or more buildings and are not a BUA.

Hamlet (HAMLET) A hamlet is a collection of several compounds or sleeping houses in isolation from small settlements or urban areas. Hamlets are characterized as a collection of lowdensity settlements between one and 50 buildings and falls within 65 meters of one another.

See "Data Release Statement GRID3 SSD Settlement Extents V1 Alpha.pdf" for more details

The GRID3 settlement extents have not been visually inspected for false negatives. A settlement may exist for a location where there is no polygon. This may lead to settlements not being identified. Likewise, the GRID3 settlement extents have not been visually inspected for false positives. A settlement polygon may have been falsely identified as an actual settlement.

These data are part of ongoing work and is not guaranteed to be accurate and clean. If users encounter apparent errors or misstatements in the data, they should contact GRID3 at data.queries@grid3.org.

See "Data Release Statement GRID3 SSD Settlement Extents V1 Alpha.pdf" for more details