Integrated Data on Population and Environment
TerraPop's Mission
Enabling research, learning, and policy analysis by providing integrated spatiotemporal data describing people and their environment
Terra Populus integrates the world’s population and environmental data, including
- Population censuses and surveys
- Land cover data classified from satellite imagery
- Temperature, precipitation, and related climate data based on weather station measurements
- Land use data derived from censuses and surveys in combination with remotely sensed data
Data that are interoperable across time, space, and scientific domain enable researchers to understand the dramatic transformation of the earth’s inhabitants and their environment. TerraPop integrates data across domains through location-based transformations among three major data structures: raster, area-level, and microdata. This integration enables researchers to discover and use datasets from other disciplines that they would otherwise be unfamiliar with or find cumbersome to use. With easy access to data from multiple domains, researchers are empowered to conduct cutting edge cross-disciplinary research to address complex problems at the intersection of human and natural systems.
News
- TerraPop was recently named one of GIS Geography's top 10 GIS data sources and featured in articles on GIS Geography and GIS Lounge.
- Check out TerraScope - a new map-based portal for exploring the data in the TerraPop collection. TerraScope lets you see where variables are available, display color-coded maps of area-level data, preview raster data, and more. Read more in a recent MPC Use it for Good blog post.
- Our article, “Terra Populus: Workflows for integrating and harmonizing geospatial population and environment data” was selected as the Best Paper in Volume 11 of the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries. The award announcement stated, “The ubiquity of demographic studies makes the work done on this project of broad applicability, and thus likely to lead to new research, and a new and deeper understanding of the results of the application of research findings."