Population Estimation Service

The Population Estimation Service is a Web-based service for estimating population totals and related statistics within a user-defined region. It enables users of a wide variety of map clients and tools to quickly obtain estimates of the number of people residing in specific areas without having to download and analyze large amounts of spatial data. The service accepts polygons that define areas of interest, then returns population totals, land area, quality measures, and basic parametric statistics for the requested polygons based on GPWv3.

Service Features

The service is accessible through three standard protocols used by many online map tools and clients: the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Processing Service (WPS) standard, a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface, and a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface. Standards-based clients such as uDig are able to submit requests using the OGC WPS. Users of ArcGIS software from ESRI can submit requests through SOAP. The REST interface is intended for use with lightweight javascript clients.

The parametric statistics returned for each supplied polygon include the count (number of grid cells used in the analysis), minimum population count, maximum population count, range of population counts, mean population counts, and standard deviation of population counts.
Two measures of data quality are included in the service results. The first measure reflects the precision of the input data and the second indicates when the requested polygons are too small in area compared with the underlying input data to produce reliable population statistics.

Access

To access the Population Estimation Service, users need to work with an online map client or Geographic Information System (GIS) software package that supports spatial queries through one of the three supported protocols. The service interfaces are available at: