DataNet Full Proposal: Terra Populus: A Global Population/Environment Data Network

Terra Populus: A Global Population/Environment Data Network (TerraPop) will develop organizational and technical infrastructure that will integrate, preserve, and disseminate data describing changes in the human population and environment over time. A plethora of high-quality environmental and population datasets are available, but they are widely dispersed, have incompatible or inadequate metadata, and have incompatible geographic identifiers. The project will enable researchers to identify and merge data from heterogeneous sources to study the relationships between human behavior and the natural world.

TerraPop will focus on four specific kinds of data: (1) census and survey microdata describing the characteristics of individuals and their families and households; (2) aggregate census and survey data, describing the characteristics of places, including aggregate population characteristics, land use, and land cover; (3) remote-sensing data describing land cover and other environmental characteristics; and (4) climate data describing temperature, precipitation, and other climate-related variables. All four data types have an important temporal dimension; most of the data span the past five decades, and some sources reach back to the nineteenth century. TerraPop will make these data interoperable across time and space, disseminate them to the public and to multiple research communities, and preserve them for future generations.

Understanding of interactions between population and the environment has been hampered by the dearth of internationally comparable data. This infrastructure will expand the quality and quantity of such data while making them highly interoperable and easily accessible. Population data closely integrated with data on the environment will allow us to describe the unfolding transformation of human and ecological systems. Data on the human population are crucial for understanding changes in the Earth?s biological and climate processes; equally important, data on climate and land provide essential tools for understanding the impact of environmental change on human behavior. 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. The data collection and its analysis tools will contribute to education and public understanding. It will allow teachers to integrate research and teaching, bringing the excitement of discovery into the classroom from primary school to graduate school. More broadly, TerraPop will be a model for the sustainable expansion, maintenance, and improvement of a global data resource.