About the projects and the data products

Gridded Population of the World (GPWv3) is the third edition of a large-scale data product that demonstrates the spatial distribution of human populations across the globe.  The purpose of the GPWv3 project is to provide a spatially disaggregated population layer that is compatible with datasets from social, economic, and earth science fields.  The output is unique in that the distribution of human population is converted from national or subnational spatial units (usually administrative units) of varying resolutions, to a series of geo-referenced quadrilateral grids at a resolution of 2.5 arc minutes.

GPWv3 incorporates a number of improvements to the two prior iterations of GPW.  Input administrative data have been improved for nearly all of the 232 countries included in the dataset. (The number of administrative units has increased three-fold since GPWv2 and twenty-fold since GPWv1.)  Additionally, the input data years have been updated for over two-thirds of the countries.  The population data estimates, previously only available for 1990 and 1995, are also now provided for the period 1990–2015, by quinquennial years. The population estimates for 2005, 2010, and 2015 were produced in collaboration with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme (FAO) as GPW: Future Estimates. Finally, the map collection has been vastly expanded to include population density, and sub-national administrative boundary maps at country, continental, and global levels.

The Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) provides a new suite of data products that add rural-urban specification to GPWv3. This project was developed out of a need for researchers to be able to distinguish population spatially by urban and rural areas.  The central data product resulting from GRUMP is a Gridded Population of the World with Urban Reallocation in which spatial and population data of both administrative units and urban extents are gridded at a resolution of 30 arc-seconds.  Additional data sets resulting from GRUMP include a 30 arc-second land area grid showing urban areal extents worldwide, and a database of human settlements, their spatial coordinates, and populations. The GRUMP data currently available on this website constitute the alpha editions of these products (GRUMP alpha).

The table below shows how the GPW has developed and expanded over the years and how GRUMP alpha further expands on this work. In addition, the table lists the data products available for download from the Data and Maps page.