Planwise population data types cheat sheet

Intro

This is a simple cheat sheet for the population sources we use in Planwise

Types of sources

There are two main types of data sources, top-down and bottom-up

Top-down

General census data is usually distributed by units (areas within the country) To get a top-down raster file there’s a process that distributes the information of those units into a grid 100mx100m or 1kmx1km There are two ways of distributing that population:

Constrained

The population is distributed in the areas that are classified as settled by human: This is done using Satellite derived building footprints settlement maps combined with population data and geographic covariates (household size, consumption stats, etc.) Maxar, Ecopia and Microsoft are some of the organizations that provide the AI models for these.

Unconstrained

Population is distributed uniformly within the unit area

Bottom-up

This type of models are used when there’s no complete enumeration for the region or the information is not reliable. it uses the available information as sample. Then a model extrapolates that sample data to the complete region, taking into consideration settlement information and geospatial covariates.

References:

https://www.worldpop.org/methods/populations/

https://youtu.be/A1AvguSj41Q?t=1217