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Common boundary types that can be found online and used with Population Explorer:


            
                
  • Administrative Areas
  • Building Footprints
  • City Blocks
  • Communities
  • Districts
  • Earthquake Intensity Boundaries
  • Extreme Weather Warnings
  • Flood Warning Zones
  • Marker files
  • Neighborhoods
  • Wildfire Boundaries
  • Zip Codes

Our favorite open-source data websites

Below we share some of our favorite open-source data websites so you can effectively take your population analysis to a more critical level:

  • USGS Earth Explorer -Remote sensing data- satellite images, aerial photographs, and cartographic products
  • ESRI Open Data - Social, economic, political, environmental data. Worldwide organizations sharing data = 5637; total data sets =103,921(updated 8/2018)
  • Natural Earth Data - Global cultural and physical vector GIS datasets
  • NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center - Socioeconomic data (agriculture, climate, conservation, governance, hazards, health, infrastructure, land use, marine and coastal, population, poverty, remote sensing, sustainability, urban and water)
  • US Census Bureau - U.S. socio-economic, population, and demographic data
  • Open Topography - Community-based high-resolution topography data
  • UNEP Environmental Data Explorer - Freshwater, population, forests, emissions, climate, disasters, health and GDP spatial and non-spatial data
  • GeoNetwork - Agriculture, fisheries, land resource GIS data
  • NCAR - Climate data
  • European Environmental Agency - Datasets from the European Environment Agency - physical geography and environmental assets

A Quick Word About Shapefiles:

Simply put, a shapefile (also known as a boundary) is a data layer with attribute information associated with a specific geographic location and dataset. Shapefiles are created with spatial features including points, lines, or polygons (areas). In Population Explorer, when a shapefile layer is added to the map, the user can then view demographic and population data associated with that particular geometric feature.  

Population Explorer accepts a range of shapefile formats including KML/KMZ. You can find more information about shapefile formats here: (Shapefile Formats). 

 

 

Additional PopEx Resources

  1. Getting started
  2. Shapefiles and Markers
  3. Map Setting
  4. Data

 

Examples


Hurricane Harvey impact zone, Houston USA 2017

Intensity rings from 7.1 magnitude earthquake, Mexico 2018

Intensity rings from 7.1 magnitude earthquake, Mexico 2018

Thomas and Rye fire burn zones, California 2018

Thomas and Rye fire burn zones, California 2018

Zip-code of a business location, Los Angeles 2018

Zip-code of a business location, Los Angeles 2018

Possible Storm Surge from Tropical Storm Gordon, Golf Coast 2018

Possible Storm Surge from Tropical Storm Gordon, Golf Coast 2018

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Visit our Twitter page for more real-world examples