Terra Populus: Integrated Data on Population and Environment

Abstract

Terra Populus, part of National Science Foundation's DataNet initiative, is developing organizational and technical infrastructure to integrate, preserve, and disseminate data describing changes in the human population and environment over time. A large number of high-quality environmental and population datasets are available, but they are widely dispersed, have incompatible or inadequate metadata, and have incompatible geographic identifiers. The new Terra Populus infrastructure enables researchers to identify and merge data from heterogeneous sources to study the relationships between human behavior and the natural world.