Steven Manson (p)

Filipe Batista E Silva

IPUMS-Terra (also called TerraPop) is a cyberinfrastructure project that integrates, preserves, and disseminates massive data collections describing characteristics of the human population and environment over the last six decades. TerraPop has made a number of advances in the spatial demography of big data by making information interoperable between formats and across scientific communities. In this paper, we describe challenges of these data, or ‘deserts in the deluge’ of data, that are common to spatial big data more broadly, and explore computational solutions specific to microdata, raster, and vector data models.

John Stillwell, Konstantinos Daras (p), Martin Bell

Steven Manson

In this paper, we investigate the effects of scale and zone configuration on migration indicators and spatial interaction model parameters using a software system known as the IMAGE Studio. Internal migration flows in the United Kingdom and the local authority districts between which they move are aggregated into sets of increasingly fewer and larger polygons using alternative zone design algorithms. Indicators of migration intensity, impact and distance are revealed to vary significantly by scale but less so by zonation, whereas migration effectiveness and distance show greater scale independence but more sensitivity to zone configuration.

Filipe Batista E Silva (p), Konstantin Rosina (p), Sergio Freire, Marcello Schiavina, Carlo Lavalle, Massimo Craglia

Konstantinos Daras

Current knowledge of the spatial distribution of population is still very incomplete. It is based upon place-of-residence statistics and does not account for the fact that people shift between various locations in daily, weekly and annual cycles for reasons of shelter, work, leisure or fulfilling various necessities. Spatial mobility of people results in significant variation of local population densities, which is extremely relevant for a range of applications, from risk assessment to urban and regional planning. Despite the advances in computational capacity and data availability, spatiotemporal mapping of population remains challenging and the state-of-the-art is considerably thin. The ENACT project (“ENhancing ACTivity and population mapping”) is an ongoing applied research project aiming at producing consistent, seamless, multi-temporal, high-resolution and validated population density grids for Europe that take into account major daily and seasonal population variations. This paper provides an overview of the project, with focus on the data sources and methodologies being developed and applied to derive the first EU-wide multitemporal population density grids.