Terra Populus: Integrated Data on Population and the Environment

Matthew Sobek, University of Minnesota
Tracy Kugler, University of Minnesota
David Van Riper, University of Minnesota

Terra Populus (TerraPop) is a project designed to lower barriers to conducting human-environment interactions research. It will do this by making data with different formats from diverse scientific domains accessible and easy to use in combination. TerraPop will develop infrastructure to integrate, disseminate, and preserve data describing population and environment on a global scale over the past two centuries, including data on human population characteristics, land use, land cover, and climate. It will make these data interoperable across time and space, disseminate them to researchers and the public, and preserve them for future generations. The TerraPop data will be available to all users free of cost. TerraPop is housed at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and is funded the National Science Foundation. The initial official release of the data system is scheduled for early 2014.