The West Africa Coastal Vulnerability Mapping: GPW Version 4 Population Density, Preliminary Release 1, 2010, represents the number of persons per square kilometer, and was calculated by dividing an unreleased working version of the Gridded Population of the World (GPW), Version 4, year 2010 population count raster for the West Africa region by a land area raster and cropping the result to within 200 kilometers of the coast. GPW provides globally consistent and spatially explicit human population information and data for use in research, policy making, and communications. This is a gridded (raster) data product that renders global population data at the scale and extent required to demonstrate the spatial relationship of human populations and the environment across the globe. The gridded data set is constructed from national or subnational input units (usually administrative units) of varying resolutions. The native grid cell resolution of GPWv4 is 30 arc-second, or ~1 km at the equator.