Abstract
Where do people live, and how has this changed over timescales of centuries? High-resolution spatial information on historical human population distribution is of great significance to understand human-environment interactions and their temporal dynamics. However, the complex relationship between population distribution and various influencing factors coupled with limited data availability make it a challenge to reconstruct human population distribution over timescales of centuries. This study generated 1-km decadal population maps for the conterminous US from 1790 to 2010 using parsimonious models based on natural suitability, socioeconomic desirability, and inhabitability. Five models of increasing complexity were evaluated. The models were validated with census tract and county subdivision population data in 2000 and were applied to generate five sets of 22 historical population maps from 1790–2010. Separating urban and rural areas and excluding non-inhabitable areas were the most important factors for improving the overall accuracy. The generated gridded population datasets and the production and validation methods are described here.
Highlights
Background & SummaryHuman actions have caused substantial alterations to the Earth, transforming the landscape, affecting ecosystem patterns and processes, driving biodiversity loss, altering global hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, amplifying resource exploitation and environmental deterioration, and contributing to climate change[1,2,3]
Human population density is considered to be a useful indicator of the type and intensity of the human environment interaction, with higher population density leading to higher levels of impacts[4,5,6,7]
We chose elevation over slope to represent topographic suitability because we found that the former had a better linear relationship with population density lnðPDiÞ 1⁄4 mμzi þ bμ; f or i A μ ð4Þ
Summary
Human actions have caused substantial alterations to the Earth, transforming the landscape, affecting ecosystem patterns and processes, driving biodiversity loss, altering global hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, amplifying resource exploitation and environmental deterioration, and contributing to climate change[1,2,3]. Land use/land cover data, derived from remote sensing images, best reflect population density and have been suggested as an important source for human population mapping[19,28]. Such imagery data only became available beginning with the launch of the first land satellite, Landsat-1, in 1972. The goal of this study is to generate spatially explicit human population distribution maps for the conterminous US that could be used to advance studies of anthropogenic effects on the environment, and to provide support for policy decision-making. The modelgenerated urban extents were assessed in two fast-growing regions in which historical data were available[36,37]: San Francisco/Sacramento and Baltimore/Washington DC
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