Building Footprints Across Antarctica from OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap provides building footprints across Antarctica, including residential, hospital, school, and religious structures. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team exports this data, which was last updated in May 2026. Completeness varies, with urban areas likely more detailed than remote regions.

Use Cases

• Estimate population distribution based on building locations and types.
• Assess potential damage from environmental events using building footprint data.
• Plan urban infrastructure and services using the spatial distribution of structures.
• Cross-reference local field knowledge with volunteered geographic information for validation.

Strengths

• Includes every OpenStreetMap feature tagged as a building (`building=*`).
• Covers a wide range of building types, from homes to hospitals and places of worship.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats including GEOPACKAGE, SHP, and JSON.

Limitations

• Completeness varies by region; remote areas may be incomplete.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Volunteer-contributed mapping data exported by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-13.

Geography

Antarctica