TerraPop Goals

Lower barriers to conducting interdisciplinary human-

environment interactions research by making data with

different formats from different scientific domains easily

interoperable

Provide an organizational and technical framework to

preserve, integrate, disseminate, and analyze global-

scale spatiotemporal data describing population and the

environment.

TerraPop in ContextCollaborating Organizations

• Data integration expertise

• Large census and survey

data collections & expertise

• Institutional foundation

• Human-environment

interactions research

expertise

• Environmentally-oriented

data collections & expertise

• Data preservation and

sustainability expertise

• Social science data

collections & expertise

• Major producers and distributors of data on both humans and their environment

• Major producers of tools for integrating and transforming data across formats

• Leaders in preservation and sustainability

Background

Sustainable Digital Data Access and

Preservation Network (DataNet) Provide reliable digital preservation, access, integration, and

analysis

Anticipate and adapt to technological change and user needs

Engage with frontiers of computer/information science and CI

Serve as component elements of interoperable data

preservation and access network

established in 2009

established in 2011

TerraPop in ContextDataNet Cyberinfrastructure

Curated population and

environment data collection

Exposed through DataONE,

SEAD

Extracts exportable to DFC

Integration services

Potentially available through

DFC, SEAD

Open source components and

API

• T W O D O M AI N S : P O P U L AT I O N & E N V I R O N M E N T

• T H R E E D ATA S T R U C T U R E S

• Microdata

• Area-level data

• Rasters

Source Data

Making disparate data formats interoperable

Microdata: Characteristics of individuals

and households

Area-level data:Characteristics of places defined

by boundaries

Raster data:Values tied to spatial

coordinates

Location-Based Integration

Microdata

Area-level dataRasters

Mix and match

variables originating in

any of the data structures

Obtain output in the

data structure most

useful to you

Location-Based Integration

Individuals and householdswith their environmental

and social context

Microdata

Area-level dataRasters

Age Sex

36 M

34 F

11 M

8 M

42 M

39 F

15 F

Landcover

Forest

Forest

Forest

Forest

Grassland

Grassland

Grassland

Location-Based Integration

Summarized environmental

and population

Microdata

Area-level dataRasters

characteristics for administrative

districts

County ID

G01001

G01003

G01005

G01007

County ID Mean Ann.

Precip.

Median HH

Income

G01001 768 50,500

G01003 589 48,500

G01005 867 51,000

G01007 701 50,750

Location-Based Integration

Rasters of

population and

environment

data

Microdata

Area-level dataRasters

Why TerraPop?

Data Access

Preservation

Documentation

Creation

Transformations

Improved Data Access

Preservation

Data producers have no preservation plan GLI crops data

Previous versions of data difficult or impossible

to find MODIS Land Cover Collection 4 superseded by Collection 5,

but Collection 4 is unavailable

Documentation

Data lacks sufficient (or any) metadata

http://gli.environment.umn.edu/

Documentation

GLI crops data originally provided through an

anonymous FTP site

No metadata provided with the data files

So, we wrote it!

http://www.earthstat.org/

http://www.earthstat.org/wp-content/uploads/METADATA_HarvestedAreaYield175Crops.pdf

Abaca – Harvested Area GeoTIFF Metadatahttp://www.earthstat.org

Abaca – Harvested Area GeoTIFF Metadatahttp://www.terrapop.org

Creation

Historical subnational GIS data Matched to census data

Aligned with most recent GIS data available for a given

country

Photographed CountriesCensus Bureau Library, Library of Congress, Harvard

Creation

Historical subnational GIS data Matched to census data

Aligned with most recent GIS data available for a given

country

Area-level data Tabulated from census microdata

Obtained from census agencies as digital files, PDFs, or

HTML tables

Transformations

Continuous Binary Categorical

Min Percent area Mode

Max Total area Number of Classes

Mean

Count

Percent area*

Total area*

* Available for some continuous agricultural rasters

Area-Level Summary of Raster Data

Data in TerraPop

Completed GIS Boundary Files GIS Boundary Files In Progress

Beta Raster data

Global Landscapes Initiative (GLI) Yield and harvested area for 175 crops

Global Land Cover 2000 (GLC2000) Land cover data, circa 2000, derived from the VEGETATION

instrument on the SPOT 4 satellite

WorldClim Climate data describing temperature, precipitation, and

bioclimatic variables, created from weather station data

collected from approximately 1950-2000

New Raster Data

MODIS Land Cover Type (MCD12Q1) Yearly land cover data derived from the MODIS Terra and

Aqua satellites, available for 2001 - 2012

500 meter spatial resolution

Available in five land cover classifications

IGBP

University of Maryland

LAI/fPAR

Net Primary Productivity

Plant Functional Type

Now available on our staging site

Project Status

Currently in project year 4

Prepping a rollout of new data, but you can

preview it at http://beta2.terrapop.org

Prepping a new UI for summer 2015

Always creating new data!