Nigerian Settlement Extents with Morphological and Environmental Metrics

GRID3 NGA - Settlement Extents v4.0 provides a geographic representation of settlements across Nigeria, delineated into blocks within urban and small settlement areas. The dataset is enriched with morphological, environmental, and building metrics for each block. Version 4.0 supersedes v3.1, incorporating new blocks in urban areas and removing falsely detected settlements identified during fieldwork.

Use Cases

• Analyze settlement block morphology using integrated road, railway, and river inputs for urban planning.
• Assess environmental metrics across delineated urban and small settlement areas.
• Utilize building footprint and remote-sensing inputs to model population distribution.
• Compare settlement extents between v4.0 and the superseded v3.1 to validate fieldwork corrections.

Strengths

• Dataset is versioned, with v4.0 superseding v3.1 and documenting specific improvements.
• Data integrates multiple inputs including road, railway, river, settlement extent, building footprint, and remote-sensing sources.
• Each settlement block is enriched with morphological, environmental, and building metrics.

Limitations

• The dataset's spatial accuracy may be limited by the resolution of the integrated remote-sensing inputs.
• Fieldwork identified falsely detected settlements in prior versions, suggesting potential for residual classification errors.
• The specific count of settlement blocks, rows, or geographic size is not provided in the input.

Provenance

Source

Center for Integrated Earth System Information (CIESIN), Columbia University, published by GRID3.

Collection Method

Generated from integrated road, railway, river, settlement extent, building footprint, and remote-sensing inputs.

Freshness

Last updated on March 23, 2026.

Geography

Nigeria