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Columbia University’s Marc Levy on Mapping Population and Geographic Data

September 24, 2009 By Brian Klein
An interactive tool from Columbia University, the Gridded Population of the World (GPW) database, makes it easy to combine population and geographic data, explains Marc Levy, director of CIESIN at Columbia, in an interview with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
“If you want to ask questions about how people are located with respect to drought hazards, for example, you can take your map of the location of droughts, overlay it with our map of population, and then you can get a sense of how many people are located in these drought zones,” Levy says. The user can do the same thing with infectious disease risk, vulnerability to sea-level rise, and other indicators.

GPW’s data is available to the public as:
- A gallery of maps created by CIESIN;
- Raw data that can be downloaded in GIS format;
- An open web-mapping service that can be linked to Google Earth;
- TerraViva!, a program for user-generated maps.
Through GPW, CIESIN aims to provide globally consistent and spatially explicit human population information and data that is compatible with datasets from social, economic, and earth science fields for use in research, policy making, and communications.
Topics: conservation, data, demography, PHE, population, video