A friend introduced me to this fascinating 3D representation of the world’s population data showing the latest (2015) as well as at 1990, and the changes. Most interesting to see the declines (in red) and growth over the years. For example, remarkable to see the urbanization with huge move of rural population to the cities. Now guess where is the cities cluster with 40M people? Click this and explore. Use your mouse to travel the world exploring amazing population data!
This project wields data from the Global Human Settlement Layer, which uses “satellite imagery, census data, and volunteered geographic information” to create population density maps.In parts of the world where census data is unreliable (e.g., India, China), population density was visibly noisy on the maps.Using this data for research purposes has a number of caveats, and most are very well detailed in this paper in the Journal of Maps by Duncan Smith.The data is processed using Google Earth Engine (example script is here). A more detailed explanation of the data processing is here.
Credits and Sources
Human Terrain. (2018). The Pudding. Retrieved 20 December 2018, from https://pudding.cool/2018/10/city_3d/
Global Human Settlement – Home – European Commission. (2018). Ghslsys.jrc.ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 20 December 2018, from https://ghslsys.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php
(2018). Tandfonline.com. Retrieved 20 December 2018, from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17445647.2017.1400476