A Downscaled Population Density Map of the EU from Commune Data and Land Cover Information

Population data in the European Union are available at the level of the commune. More detailed data are available for some countries, but they are often confidential or difficult to obtain. CORINE Land Cover (CLC) provides georeferenced land cover information with a medium resolution (minimum mapping unit: 25 ha). This paper describes several approaches followed to combine commune population data with CLC to produce a EU-wide grid with 1 ha resolution of downscaled population density. An iterative algorithm was first developed to estimate coefficients of a simple multiplicative model. In a further stage the information provided by the point survey LUCAS (Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey) has been integrated through a logit regression to improve the coefficients of the model. Some examples of application are presented: an attempt of automatic definition of urban agglomerations and the estimation of the population living less than 10 km from the coast. This work is a complement to the initiative of the “European Forum for Geostatistics”, an initiative of a group of National Statistical Institutes, that propose a population density grid with 1 km2 resolution with a bottom-up approach, i.e. produced from individual census data, that are aggregated to respect confidentiality. The top-down method presented in this paper is obviously less accurate, but provides a way to fill the EU population gridded map for countries that do not apply the bottom-up approach