The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools project is a community-based project to gather a census of cities around the world.

The overall aims of WUDAPT are to:

• use the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification framework as the starting point for characterizing cities in a consistent manner
• use Geo-Wiki to sample land cover and land use types across LCZs (e.g. impervious surfaces (buildings, roads, other), pervious surfaces, grassland, etc.)
• develop tools (online and mobile-based) to obtain other parameters such as building materials, building dimensions, canopy widths, etc.
• provide open access to this dataset so that researchers around the world can use the data for many different types of applications, from climate and weather modeling to energy balance studies
• provide basic tools in the portal to allows researchers to aggregate the data to a user-specified reference grid (resolution and starting location) and compare cities around the world.

For WUDAPT to work, we need to build a community of interested urban experts and interested researchers who will take active part by:

• using the training materials to classify your city into LCZs
• contributing your LCZ map to WUDAPT
• helping us to collect other parameters using the online and mobile-based tools that will be developed.