MINNEAPOLIS, Minn., USA - September 11, 2012. East View is pleased to announce the release of LandScan Global 2011 (LandScan). Developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for various agencies of the United States Government, LandScan incorporates spatial data and imagery analysis with the latest census findings and updated political boundaries into a tool for researchers to accurately model how many people are in a particular location, anywhere on Earth.
LandScan provides the population value of every square kilometer of landmass on Earth - approximately 150M square kilometers. The technology uses innovative algorithms to determine population based on satellite images of buildings, roads, and other manmade structures along with other sources like local census data, geographical information such as the slope of the land as well as the intensity of surrounding agriculture.
LandScan 2011 represents a significant improvement over LandScan 2010 for the following reasons:
- Many countries around the world conduct their national census decennially on "0" year making 2010 a particularly rich year for census data
- ORNL developed a "Settlement Mapper Tool", which rapidly delineates and characterizes settlements using high-resolution imagery. The tool was used extensively for verification and validation, for refining urban built-up areas, for adding thousands of smaller villages and populated places, and for the identification and mitigation of input data anomalies to improve the spatial precision and values of the population distribution.
- Changes to the population distribution for Japan include impacts due to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant incident. Resultant population displacements including shelters and temporary housing were integrated into the distribution.
- Updates were made to the country grid to reflect changes in global political boundaries and sovereignty, such as Sudan and South Sudan.
"Through East View's LandScan web application, we have seen how East View has made LandScan, one of ORNL's most successfully licensed products and now in its thirteenth year, more accessible to a wider group of researchers," said ORNL Director Thom Mason.
About East View
East View was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. East View is comprised of East View Information Services (
www.eastview.com), East View Geospatial (
www.geospatial.com) and East View Map Link (
www.maplink.com). East View maintains thousands of supplier/publisher relationships throughout the world for maps and geospatial data and Russian, Arabic and Chinese-produced social and hard science content. East View manages a data center, library and warehouse in Minneapolis where it hosts and stores dozens of foreign language databases, hundreds of thousands of maps and atlases and millions of geospatial, Russian, Chinese and Arabic metadata records.
Contact:
Rodney Buhrsmith
Chief Marketing Officer
East View Information Services
10601 Wayzata Boulevard
Minneapolis, MN 55305 USA
Email Contact
Tel: +1.952.252.1201
www.eastview.com