Overview

This dataset contains high-resolution population estimates for the number of people living in ~30-meter grid tiles in the United States. Facebook, in partnership with the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, used computer vision techniques to identify buildings from publicly accessible mapping services to create this population dataset. A full description of the methodology used to derive this data is here.

Each point in this dataset represents the center of a 1-arc-second-by-1-arc-second grid cell (roughly 30x30m at the equator), and the value is the (statistical) number of people in that grid. This is commonly fractional and occasionally less than one.