This is an author's accepted manuscript of an article published in "International Journal of Geographical Information Science"; Volume 27, Issue 12, 2013; copyright Taylor & Francis; available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13658816.2013.799283This article describes a high-resolution land cover data set for Spain and its application
to dasymetric population mapping (at census tract level). Eventually, this vector layer
is transformed into a grid format. The work parallels the effort of the Joint Research
Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, in collaboration with Eurostat and the
European Environment Agency (EEA), in building a population density grid for the
whole of Europe, combining CORINE Land Cover with population data per commune.
We solve many of the problems due to the low resolution of CORINE Land Cover,
which are especially visible with Spanish data. An accuracy assessment is carried out
from a simple aggregation of georeferenced point population data for the region of
Madrid. The bottom-up grid constructed in this way is compared to our top-down grid.
We show a great improvement over what has been reported from commune data and
CORINE Land Cover, but the improvements seem to come entirely from the higher
resolution data sets and not from the statistical modeling in the downscaling exercise.
This highlights the importance of providing the research community with more detailed
land cover data sets, as well as more detailed population data. The dasymetric grid is
available free of charge from the authors upon request.The authors acknowledge financial support from the BBVA Foundation-Ivie research programme and the first author also acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, ECO2011-23248 project. Results mentioned, but not shown, are available from the authors upon request. The grid numbers are also available from the authors.Goerlich Sanchis, FJ.; Cantarino Martí, I. (2013). A population density grid for Spain. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. 27(12):1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2013.799283S117271
