Advances in producing and evaluating gridded population data at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) produces open and free gridded data on human settlements and population at the European and global level. These datasets provide robust sources for decision making, planning, disaster risk management and scientific research. In this talk, we will provide an overview of recent developments and advances with this regard. Specifically, we will highlight ongoing work, novel datasets and underlying methods, including global, gridded future projections (GHS-WUP-POP; 1-km population estimates from 1980 to 2100), historical gridded population data for Europe since the 1960s using spatially-explicit backcasting models and innovative, chain-linking based dasymetric population downscaling, including age-sex disaggregations, as well as global historical gridded population data from 1900 onwards produced by integrating historical, long-term land-use models with data from the Global Human Settlement Layer.

For robust and transparent gridded population data production, uncertainty awareness and -quantification is key. Hence, at the JRC, we explore novel ways to conduct accuracy assessments of gridded population data. For example, we benchmark our datasets against increasingly available authoritative gridded population and other official data reported by national census agencies, and develop new metrics tailored to estimate the accuracy of gridded population data and similar datasets in meaningful and intuitive ways. In our talk, we will highlight recent methodological advances on gridded population data quality assessments and showcase exemplary results of benchmarking and cross-comparing different gridded population datasets. Moreover, we will reflect on pitfalls and caveats that may occur when gridded population data accuracy assessments involve unsuitable data processing or sampling design and highlight the importance of reflected considerations of the fitness-for-use of these datasets.