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A Brief History of Global Gridded Population Databases

The initial Gridded Population of the World (GPW) data set, GPW version 1, was an outgrowth of a Global Demography Workshop held at CIESIN in 1994.   It was produced by Waldo Tobler, Uwe Deichmann, Jan Gottsegen, and Kelley Maloy of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), all at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with partial support from CIESIN under U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Grant NAGW-2901. (This data set was superceded by versions 2 and 3 and is therefore no longer available online; however, it may be requested via SEDAC User Services.)  Early efforts prior to GPW are describe in some detail in by Deichmann in an NCGIA report.


Subsequent to version 1, Uwe Deichmann made a number of regional improvements to the underlying data set in collaboration with several other institutions. Revisions for Africa were supported by the United Nations Environment Programme/Global Resource Information Database (UNEP-GRID), Sioux Falls and by the World Resources Institute (WRI); and for Asia by UNEP-GRID, Geneva, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and NCGIA.  For Latin America, a comprehensive database was assembled by the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT). Glenn Hyman of CIAT, Ashbindu Singh of UNEP-GRID, Sioux Falls, and Ron Witt and Hy Dao at UNEP-GRID, Geneva were partners in these efforts.  Some of these databases differed in their approach from GPW in that they included access to roads as a means to reallocate population; it is often referred to as an accessibility model for population distribution. Around the same time, Oakridge National Laboratory began developing a highly modeled population surface known as LandScan.

GPW version 2 was produced in 1999-2000 by CIESIN in close collaboration with Uwe Deichmann (presently at the World Bank) via a subcontract with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Funding for GPW v2 was provided by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) under contract NAS5-98162 and by the World Resources Institute (WRI).  GPW version 2 incorporated the basic improvements to the population inputs that occurred in the development of the regional initiatives. GPW v2 nor prior databases included the 2000 rounds of censuses.

The 2000 round of censuses were formally included in GPW version 3, which was produced by CIESIN in partnership with the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), from mid-2002 through mid-2004. Around the same time, beginning early 2001, CIESIN and colleagues at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the World Bank, and CIAT convened to pursue the possibility of constructing a global database of urban and rural areas that could then be used, not only in an of itself, but also to reallocate population.  That effort led to the database now known as the GRUMP suite of data products.  Like the accessibility models above, the population grid produced by GRUMP is lightly modeled using urban areas rather than roads.

GPW v3 included a major update to the underlying population and spatial data, and in its wake, additional updates have been made, for example, to the Africa accessibility model.  Similarly, in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), CIESIN and CIAT have constructed a gridded population projection to 2015.

For full attribution for the development of these recent efforts, please see the credits and acknowledgments or other links above.  Additional differences between these various datasets are documented in the FAQ.

 


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