Every time you use a public building, travel down a road, or flick on a light switch, you're interacting with infrastructure — the set of facilities, structures, and resources that a society needs to operate. Studying ways to improve infrastructure requires engaging with factors such as the economy, social patterns, health, the environment, and education.

Data collected by NASA’s Earth-observing instruments help researchers understand how infrastructure around the world reacts to the changing climate and other environmental events. NASA also curates data from socioeconomic surveys, which offer a look at the services people can access and help identify gaps in infrastructure.

Our data products useful to the study of infrastructure include Geographic Information System (GIS) coverage for specific areas, population distribution maps, administrative area boundaries, and estimates of different regions’ access to public services such as roads, electricity, and public transport. This information offers crucial insight for researchers, policymakers, and other applied users looking to understand how infrastructure may be improved to better serve communities around the globe.