New user interface for TerraPop

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From January 13 to 17, 2014 Geneva’s CICG center will be the site of a major international conference and exhibit aimed at improving access to critical information on the global environment. The GEO-X Plenary and Geneva Ministerial Summit brings together experts from 90 governments and nearly 70 organizations and will include an exhibit of cutting edge technology and more than 30 forums and panel discussions, many open to the general public. Topics will include Agriculture and Food Security, Measuring Biodiversity, Disaster Risk Reduction, Cholera Early Warning, Ocean Acidification, UNEP Live!, and Water Security. The summit will be presided over by GEO’s four co-chairs: China, the European Commission, South Africa and the United States. The United States will be represented at GEO-X by a high level multiagency delegation. For nearly a decade, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) has been driving the interoperability of thou­sands of individual space-based, airborne and in situ Earth observations around the world. Often these separate systems yield just snapshot assessments, leading to critical gaps in scientific understanding. GEO is addressing such gaps by providing easy, open access to organized observations that enable an increasingly integrated view of our changing Earth. Summit participants will look at how the international community can increase the sustainability and quality of observation networks and make the maximum possible volume of data freely accessible. For sound science to shape sound policy, leaders and other decision-makers require this fuller picture as an indispensable foundation of environmental decision-making. U.S. Mission Geneva / Eric Bridiers

The TerraPop team is excited to announce the launch of a new, completely redesigned user interface. TerraPop enables research, learning, and policy analysis by providing integrated spatio-temporal data describing people and their environment. The new interface is more intuitive and easier to use. Choosing data and creating an extract are structured as a step-by-step process. You are guided through the workflow, seeing the information you need to make selections at each step. Throughout the process, you have access to complete metadata describing available variables, datasets, and geographic levels. Give the new extract builder a try at https://data.terrapop.org.

One particularly helpful feature is integrated selection of variables and datasets, which are now performed on the same screen. This integration allows you to easily see which variables are available in which datasets and make your selections accordingly. In the screenshot below, the user has selected datasets for Guatemala 2002, Honduras 2001, and Mexico 2000, and variables for total population and population by age. The population by age variables are only available for Mexico, but Guatemala and Honduras currently have only total population data.

NewUI_area-level-grid_screenshot

The new interface allows you to create area-level extracts, consisting of records describing geographic units, such as U.S. states. The data can be linked to geographic boundary files, which you can include in your extract. Area-level extracts can include population data from any of 159 countries, with variables related to demographics, education, employment, and household characteristics. They can also include land cover and climate data summarized from rasters, such as the percent forest cover or mean annual temperature for each geographic unit.

For land cover and climate raster data, another option is TerraClip, a tool that allows you to get a raster for your country of interest for any of the raster datasets in the TerraPop collection. Over the next few months, we will add the ability to create raster extracts (which may also incorporate area-level data) and microdata extracts with the ability to attach variables derived from area-level and raster data. For now, you can access these types of extracts in “TerraPop classic,” our old interface. Join our mailing list to receive email updates on this and other news about TerraPop.

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