Spatiotemporal mapping of population in Europe: The ENACT project in a nutshell

Current knowledge of spatial distribution of population is still nowadays very incomplete. It is based upon place-of-residence statistics and does not account for the fact that people shift between various locations in daily, weekly and annual cycles for reasons of shelter, work, leisure or fulfilling various necessities. Spatial mobility of people results in strong variation of local population densities, which is extremely relevant for a range of applications, from risk assessment to urban and regional planning. Despite the advances in computational power and data availability, spatiotemporal mapping of population remains challenging and the state-of-the-art is considerably thin. The ENACT project (“ENhancing ACTivity and population mapping”) is an ongoing applied research project aiming at producing consistent, seamless, multi-temporal, high-resolution and validated population density grids for Europe that take into account major daily and seasonal population variations. This paper provides an overview of the project, with focus on the data sources and methodologies being developed and applied to derive the first EU-wide multitemporal population density grids.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen