The Population Estimation Service is a web-based service hosted by NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) that lets users of a wide variety of map clients and tools quickly obtain estimates of the number of people residing in a user-defined geographic region, without having to download and analyze large amounts of spatial data.
The Population Estimator data tool lets users visualize changes in total population over multiple decades (2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and a projection to the year 2020) together with basic demographic characteristics (age and sex) for the year 2010.
The service accepts polygons that define areas of interest, a list of one or more requested statistics from the set [COUNT, MINIMUM, MAXIMUM, RANGE, MEAN, STD, SUM]; and a list of one or more variable identifiers from the list of variables described here (If you have trouble accessing the link to list of variables, please contact User Services for help). The estimates returned are based on data from SEDAC's Gridded Population of the World, Version 4 Revision 11 (GPWv4.11) data collection.
The service is accessible through three standard protocols used by many online map tools and clients: the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web processing service (WPS) standard, a representational state transfer (REST) interface, and a simple object access protocol (SOAP) interface. Standards-based clients such as uDig and QGIS are able to submit requests using the OGC WPS. The REST interface is intended for use with lightweight javascript clients.
In addition to the Population Estimator data tool, the Population Estimation Service may also be accessed through other online map clients or Geographic Information System (GIS) software packages if they support spatial queries through one of the three supported protocols. The service descriptions for each protocol are available as follows:
A service request may be made directly to the REST service using syntax that follows the default example, but may differ in terms of user defined variable identifiers and requested statistics.
Updates
The latest update to the Population Estimation Service and the Population Estimator data tool lets users visualize changes in total population over multiple decades (2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and a projection to the year 2020) together with basic demographic characteristics (age and sex) for the year 2010. A new feature of the tool is a “population pyramid” for the year 2010, with estimated population counts by five-year age groups for males and females. See our related tutorial.
Recommended Citation
Center for International Earth Science Information Network - CIESIN - Columbia University. 2018. Population Estimation Service, Version 3 (PES-v3). Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). https://doi.org/10.7927/H4DR2SK5. Accessed DAY MONTH YEAR.