Tracy Kugler, Steven Manson, Steven Ruggles, Matthew Sobek, Jaideep SrivastavaMinnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota

GOALS

1. Develop a framework to integrate global-scale spatiotemporal data

2. Disseminate global-scale data on population, land use, land cover, and climate from the 19th century to the present

3. Create a sustainable organization that can guarantee preservation and access over multiple decades

SCIENFIFIC NEED

Increasing Population – Increasing Environmental Pressure

1950-2000

PARTNERS

The TerraPop project is led by the Minnesota Population Center (MPC). The MPC is a University-wide interdisciplinary cooperative for demographic research. MPC data projects include integration and harmonization of census and survey data spanning over two centuries and sixty countries. As a leading developer and disseminator of demographic data, the MPC serves a broader audience of some 50,000 researchers worldwide

The Institute on the Environment (IonE) is solving the world’s greatest environmental challenges including energy, food, freshwater, population and development. Through the Global Landscapes Initiative, IonE is working to understand extreme land use changes, to improve our ability to balance human needs with environmental stewardship, and to promote secure landscapes across the globe. IonE will provide expertise on data fusion techniques and on usability and data access for environmental data.

The University of Minnesota Libraries have led the development of major digital library projects, including significant international collaborations, publisher partnerships, and large-scale production systems. The Libraries will facilitate key connections between TerraPop and scientific communities and provide insights on organizational sustainability.

The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) works at the intersection of the social, natural, and information sciences, and specializes in online data and information management, spatial data integration and training, and interdisciplinary research related to human interaction with the environment. CIESIN will assist in accessing and transforming key data inputs and contribute to metadata and data stewardship activities.

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is the world’s largest social science data archive and the home of the Data Documentation Initiative Alliance, an organization dedicated to developing metadata standards for data collections. ICPSR will contribute expertise on designing metadata, configuring and implementing a distributed preservation and replication structure, and devising TerraPop’s confidentiality framework.

DATA

DATA INTEGRATION AND DISSEMINATION

TerraPop will make existing collections of environmental and population data more valuable by making them interoperable over time, space, and topic, and by developing a dissemination system to facilitate data searching and discovery. By creating a framework for locating, analyzing, and visualizing the world’s population and environment in time and space, TerraPop will provide unprecedented opportunities for investigating the agents of change, assessing their implications for human society and the environment, and developing policies to meet future challenges.

World Population, 1000-2000

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1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000Year

Popu

latio

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TerraPop  

World  Popula-on  1000  -­‐  2000  

Year  

Popu

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n  (m

illions)  

Increasing population

• Population doubled• Economy grew seven-fold

Increasing agriculture

• Food consumption tripled• Water use tripled

Increasing energy use

• Fossil fuel consumption increased four-fold

ENVIRONMENTAL DATA

Environmental data help researchers detect changes in natural resource availability, biodiversity, ecosystem goods and services, and climate. Many environmental data are obtained through satellite-based remote sensing. Other monitoring systems, such as temperature, wind and water gauges, also gather environmental data.

Land Use and Land Cover

TerraPop will include data that describes the distribution of types of vegetation over the earth’s surface and the agricultural, urban or other purpose for which people use the land. Land use/land cover data are typically provided in a grid in which each cell is coded to represent the type of cover or use at that location. This type of information is interpreted from satellite images, sometimes supplemented by information from surveys.

Climate

TerraPop will also include data on temperature, precipitation, and cloud cover over time. These data are primarily derived from measurements made at weather stations around the world. Data from multiple stations are interpolated to create continuous grids.

POPULATION DATA

Population data capture demographic trends with significant social, economic, and environmental implications — shifting

age structures as birth rates decline, rising urbanization and international migration, industrialization of the

developing world, and improvements in education and health. These data are primarily generated

by censuses and surveys conducted by national governments.

Microdata

Microdata describe the characteristics of individuals (e.g., age, sex, occupation, level of education, country of birth) and households (e.g., number of persons, ownership of dwelling, number of rooms, water supply). TerraPop will draw on microdata made available by the IPUMS-International project, which currently includes data from nearly 62 countries and a total of 185 censuses

dating from 1850 to the present.

Small-area data

Small-area population data describe the characteristics of places (e.g., municipalities,

counties, territories, states). These data typically group individuals or households into categories

(e.g., age ranges, industry of employment, type of water supply) and summarize the population of the

area by counts in each category. The data may be “cross-tabulated” to provide breakdowns across multiple categories.

Data  dissemina+on  system  architecture  

Semantic Integration

Semantic integration focuses on meaning: that is, how pieces of information relate to each other. Datasets with comparable subject content often include variations in coding, definitions, or classifications. For example, the coding for marital status varies greatly from one census to the next. TerraPop will capture these differences, reconcile them, and preserve the appropriate metadata through this process, so information is not lost or misinterpreted.

Data Fusion

Data fusion is the merging of data from multiple sources to allow inferences that would be impossible from a single source. TerraPop will include capabilities to combine data derived from different geographic representations (e.g., polygons and grids), multiple geographic scales, and different time periods. The initial data collections for TerraPop represent spatial scales ranging from a country to a specific address. Methods to reconcile the shapes and sizes of these data will allow users to scale up and down as their scientific questions merit.

Ruggles

Foley

Lougee

Chen

Alter