The spatial monitoring of the urban expansion and related population growth is useful for urban planning assessment of cities and megacities in the global South. Although market driven public programs for peri-urban low-income housing have retained much attention over the past twenty-five years in Mexico, a spatially explicit database of the consequent urban footprint together with the population census information has not been available online to the public. In this research, we build a geoscientific data collection consisting of:   A built-up layer in 2000 and 2010 for the 10 major metropolitan areas of the Mexico Central Altiplano Region; A built-up layer in 2000 for the remaining 14 most prominent cities of the Mexican Urban System. A land consumption index at county (“Municipio”) level in the Mexico Central Altiplano Region.   The Urban Footprint of Mexico  is the first online national cartography incorporating built-up and demographic expansion.

A set of 38, 30 x 30 m resolution rasters of the subsidence over Mexico City and part of its metropolitan area, has been made available through this work. Subsidence rates in Mexico, one of the most populated cities in the world, reaches up to 0.4 m/yr, mainly due to soil compaction led by over exploitation of the Mexico Basin aquifer. To accurately map the spatial and temporal evolution of this phenomena, a set of Synthetic Aperture Radar images has been processed through interferometry and the results have been formatted as rasters that can be read and analyzed on any Geographic Information System. Moreover, the whole set of rasters can be visualized as interactive animated time series of the subsidence, through the journal platform.

En la última década, un avance metodológico significativo ha permitido medir la fiabilidad de mapas regionales de usos de suelo en los paisajes altamente dinámicos de los países sub-tropicales. Lo anterior ha sido posible con un desarrollo geoestadístico y con la teoría de la lógica difusa, y ha involucrado la construcción de un acervo detallado de materiales cartográficos evaluados y de verificación. Sin embargo, la visualización de ambos materiales, de su comparación, y de la distribución espacial explícita de aciertos y errores derivados de estos estudios (con su enorme potencial visual-explicativo para la toma de decisiones con base en esta cartografía), no ha sido publicada. Presentamos aquí la visualización de aciertos y errores, con criterios de lógica difusa, del mapa de usos de suelo de alta taxonomía de la cuenca del lago de Cuitzeo extraído de la cartografía a escala 1:250,000 del Inventario Forestal Nacional del año 2000 en México.