CSE faculty involved in first-of-its-kind integration of global population and environment data
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TerraPop project will integrate the world’s largest population database with global-scale data

Contacts:

Catherine Fitch, Minnesota Population Center, fitch@umn.edu, (612) 626-3923

Todd Reubold, Institute on the Environment, reub0002@umn.edu, (612) 624-6140

Jeff Falk, University News Service, jfalk@umn.edu, (612) 626-1720

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (10/06/11) – Three computer science and engineering faculty in the College of Science and Engineering are part of a University-wide collaboration that will create new opportunities for understanding the relationship between population and the environment on a global scale.

The project, entitled Terra Populus: A Global Population / Environment Data Network or TerraPop for short, was awarded a five-year, $8 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyber Infrastructure. The Minnesota Population Center will lead the effort with support from the Institute on the Environment, the University of Minnesota Libraries, and faculty from the College of Liberal Arts and College of Science and Engineering. Additional partners include the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Terrapop will combine two centuries of census data with global environmental data including land cover, land use and climate records. Beyond the goal of integrating this information into a common database, the team plans to disseminate the newly available data to researchers around the world.

Although a plethora of high quality environmental and population datasets are currently available, they are widely dispersed, have incompatible or inadequate documentation, and include incompatible geographic identifiers. Newly available population data closely integrated with data on the environment will more clearly describe the unfolding transformation of human and ecological systems.

“By creating a framework for locating, analyzing and visualizing the world's population and environment in time and space, TerraPop will provide unprecedented opportunities for investigating the agents of change, assessing their implications for human society and the environment, and developing policies to meet future challenges,” said Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center.

The organizations collaborating on TerraPop are uniquely qualified to undertake a project of this scale. The Minnesota Population Center is home to the largest collection of census data in the world, while the Institute on the Environment has one of the most extensive databases of global land use in the country. The College of Science and Engineering’s computer scientists are leaders in data mining techniques. The University Libraries are leaders in digital preservation and data management. In addition, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is the world’s largest social science data archive, and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) is a leading research and data center focused on human-environment interactions.

"This project represents a quantum leap in our ability to see and map the relationships between people and the environment at the global scale,” said Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment. “And it represents an exciting new frontier of scientific collaboration—between computer scientists, demographers and environmental scientists— to break down our old disciplinary barriers and focus our collective energy on some of the world's biggest problems.”

TerraPop aims to accomplish four specific tasks over the coming years including:

  1. Collecting, preserving, integrating and describing datasets that measure changes in the world’s population and environment over the past two centuries
  2. Developing tools and procedures to manage and disseminate the data collections
  3. Carrying out education and outreach to engage the scientific community and the public and reach the broadest possible audience
  4. Establishing an organizational structure to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project.

The lead researchers from the University of Minnesota are Steven Ruggles (Minnesota Population Center), Jonathon Foley (Institute on the Environment), Victoria Interrante (Computer Science and Engineering), Wendy Pradt Lougee (University of Minnesota Libraries), Steven Manson (Geography), Jaideep Srivastava (Computer Science and Engineering) and Shashi Shekhar (Computer Science and Engineering).

With this award, TerraPop will be an NSF Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network (DataNet) Partner. The DataNet initiative aims to provide reliable digital preservation, access, integration and analysis capabilities for science and/or engineering data over a decades-long timeline.

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