Introducation to Terra Populus: integrated data on population and environment

In this half-day workshop, Tracy Kugler will demonstrate the new Terra Populus data access system. Building on the MPC's past experience with demographic data infrastructure projects such as IPUMS and NHGIS, Terra Populus seeks to lower the barriers for conducting interdisciplinary human-environment research by making data from different domains easily interoperable. It incorporates a variety of data types, including census microdata, census summary data, and raster data describing land cover, land use, and climate. The data access system allows users to create customized data extracts blending variables from all data types and providing the output in the user's preferred format. In this workshop, attendees will learn about the content and data processing capabilities of Terra Populus and learn how to obtain and use the data. Attendees will create extracts, download data over the internet, and analyze it in a statistical, spreadsheet, or GIS software package. (Please note: participants must bring their own laptops.