Pre-processing urban landscape structure data
To construct the urban structure dataset, we used a 2008 1.0-meter
resolution land cover dataset (City of Philadelphia, 2011), the Property
Assessment dataset from the Philadelphia Office of Property Assessment
(City of Philadelphia, 2015b) indicating number of floors in buildings
for each tax lot in the city in tabular format, and the Philadelphia
Department of Water parcels dataset. We joined the property assessment
tabular data to the parcels dataset using unique parcel IDs and created
a 1.0-meter resolution raster dataset from the “Number of Floors”
field in the Property Assessment dataset. Number of floors was
classified into three categories: lowrise (1–3 stories), midrise (4–9
stories) and highrise (>9 stories) (Larondelle et al.,
2014; I. D. Stewart & Oke, 2012). We then combined it with the land
cover raster dataset, by replacing all building land cover pixels with a
value representing building height category to create our basic urban
structure dataset.