2005 Global Population Database Release

We are pleased to announce the release of LandScan^TM 2005 Global Population Database. The LandScan^TM 2005 Global Population Database was developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for the United States Department of Defense (DoD). This release represents the seventh version of LandScan and succeeds all previous versions. It is recommended that users of previous versions of LandScan replace any earlier version with LandScan 2005.

Improvements that have been incorporated into the LandScan^TM 2005 Global Population Database are outlined below:

• Those familiar with earlier versions of LandScan will notice significant changes in the population distribution for the United States. In this latest version of LandScan, distribution modeling and analysis were calculated at the Census block level for the U.S. (over 8.2 million blocks) and reflects a more precise ambient population distribution (an aggregated average of very high-resolution nighttime and daytime populations). The population distribution incorporates several years of manual refinements from photo interpretation and imagery analysis to produce a better representation of where people are located during an average day.
• Accurate administrative boundaries are an integral part of the LandScan population distribution modeling process. LandScan 2005 incorporated administrative boundary changes for 19 countries. For these countries, an additional 9412 international second order administrative boundaries were used for the population distribution. The spatial precision of the administrative boundaries was improved for several other countries. These boundaries coincide with new census counts provided by the International Programs Center (IPC) of the United States Bureau of the Census and represent the most recent census for all countries. The date of the census counts is July 2005
• For some regions, the land cover data was substantially refined using high-resolution land cover data, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) VMAP-1, CIB, and/or scanned maps (e.g., CADRG/ADRG). In addition, new and revised VMAP-1 tiles were incorporated into the distribution analysis
• NGA’s Controlled Image Base (CIB) imagery was used extensively for verification and validation, for refining urban built-up areas, and for adding thousands of smaller villages and populated places.
• Additional algorithm refinements were developed and implemented for the population models including automated urban area analysis and village identification using high performance computing resources.

Because of these refinements we advise against cell-by-cell comparison between LandScan 2005 and earlier versions of LandScan.

The following data files are available:

• The LandScan 2005 Global Population Database at 30 arc seconds (1 km. or finer) in the following formats:

  1.Raster GIS: ESRI Grid format. [Note: the Spatial Analyst extension for ArcGis or ArcView (3.x) is required for analyzing the LandScan data.]

  2.Binary raster: ESRI binary raster format (see included documentation). Almost any high level programming language can read this file directly.

• An Area Grid file that contains the area of each 30 arc second cell. This file can be used to calculate population density. The units are sq kilometers.
• Legend files:

  ls2005.lyr - An ArcGIS layer file for the population grid

  ls2005.avl - An ArcView legend file for the population grid

• A ReadMe file that describes data contents and formats.

Please feel free to contact Landscan User Services if you have any questions or comments about LandScan 2005.

Thank you for your continued interest in LandScan Global Population Database.