Terra Populus: A Global Population/Environment Data Network

Steven Ruggles, University of Minnesota
Catherine A. Fitch, University of Minnesota
Jonathan Foley, University of Minnesota
Steven Manson, University of Minnesota
Matthew Sobek, University of Minnesota

Terra Populus, part of NSF’s new DataNet initiative, will develop organizational and technical infrastructure to integrate, preserve, and disseminate data describing changes in the human population and environment over time. A plethora 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 infrastructure will enable researchers to identify and merge data from heterogeneous sources to study the relationships between human behavior and the natural world. Terra Populus 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.