NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN has released the 2019 annual update to the Natural Resource Protection Indicators (NRPI) and Child Health Indicators (CHI) together with two new spatial datasets developed by former SEDAC project scientists Christopher Small of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and Deborah Balk of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Natural Resource Protection and Child Health Indicators, 2019 Release
This dataset supports the annual country selection process conducted by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which bases its selection criteria on a basket of governance, social, economic, and environmental indicators. For 2019, the NRPI covers 234 countries and is calculated based on the weighted average percentage of biomes under protected status. The CHI is a composite index for 195 countries derived from the average of three proximity-to-target scores.
Spatial Data from the 2011 India Census, v1
This dataset contains gridded estimates of India′s population at 1-kilometer resolution, with two spatial renderings of urban areas: one based on official tabulations of population and settlement type and the other based on the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL). The dataset was developed by a team led by Deborah Balk, former research scientist at Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), who is now associate director of CUNY’s Institute for Demographic Research. It is part of SEDAC's India Data Collection.
VIIRS Plus DMSP Change in Lights, v1
This dataset provides changes in brightness and extent of global nighttime lights networks over two decades (1992, 2002, 2013). The nightime lights imagery was sourced from the U.S. Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS) and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) Day-Night Band. It was developed by Christopher Small and several CIESIN geospatial experts. The dataset was used to assess urban growth and development in Asian megadeltas, described in a paper "Decades of urban growth and development on the Asian megadeltas" published in 2018 in Global and Planetary Change. The dataset is part of SEDAC's collection Satellite-Derived Environmental Indicators.
All of these data are available for free download (registration with Earthdata required). The India and nighttime lights data may be visualized through the SEDAC Map Viewer or open web services.