Terra Populus: Integrated Data on Population and Environment

The goal of Terra Populus (TerraPop) is to lower barriers to conducting interdisciplinary human-environment interactions research by making data with different formats from different scientific domains easily interoperable. TerraPop is developing organizational and technical infrastructure to integrate, preserve, and disseminate data describing population and environment over time. TerraPop will incorporate large international microdata and aggregate census datasets, along with land use, land cover, climate, and other environmental datasets. Currently, these data exist in a variety of data structures, have generally inadequate metadata, and have incompatible geographic identifiers. TerraPop is developing methods of integrating data from different domains and data structures based on spatio-temporal linkages among data contents. The new infrastructure will enable researchers to merge data from heterogeneous sources to study relationships between human behavior and the natural world. TerraPop will partner with data archives, data producers, and data users to create a sustainable international organization that will guarantee preservation and access over multiple decades. A beta version of the TerraPop data access system will be available in spring 2013, and initial public release is planned by the end of 2013.