Identification

Title

Historically grounded spatial population projections for the continental United States

Abstract

Large-scale spatial population projections are of growing importance to the global change community. Spatial settlement patterns are a key determinant of vulnerability to climate-related hazards as well as to land-use and its consequences for habitat, energy use, and emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants. Few projections exist of spatial distribution at national or larger scales, and while recent efforts improve on earlier approaches that simply scaled or extrapolated existing spatial patterns, important methodological shortcomings remain and models have not been calibrated to nor validated against historical trends. Here we present spatially explicit 100-year projections for the continental United States consistent with two different scenarios of possible socio-economic development. The projections are based on a new model that is calibrated to observed changes in regional population distribution since 1950, corrects for distorting effects at borders, and employs a spatial mask for designating protected or uninhabitable land. Using new metrics for comparing spatial outcomes, we find that our projections anticipate more moderate trends in urban expansion and coastal settlement than widely used existing projections. We also find that differences in outcomes across models are much larger than differences across alternative socio-economic scenarios for a given model, emphasizing the importance of better understanding of methods of spatial population projection for improved integrated assessments of social and environmental change.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7x92c72

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2013-12-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact