DataNet Full Proposal: Terra Populus: A Global Population/Environment Data Network

Terra Populus：全球人口/环境数据网络（TerraPop）将开发组织和技术基础设施，整合、保存和传播描述人口和环境随时间变化的数据。现有大量高质量的环境和人口数据集，但它们分布广泛，元数据不兼容或不充分，地理标识符也不兼容。该项目将使研究人员能够识别和合并来自不同来源的数据，以研究人类行为与自然世界之间的关系。TerraPop将专注于四种具体的数据：(1)描述个人及其家庭和家庭特征的人口普查和调查微观数据；（二）汇总普查、调查资料，说明地方的人口特征、土地利用、土地覆盖等特征；(3)描述土地覆盖和其他环境特征的遥感数据；(4)描述温度、降水和其他气候相关变量的气候数据。所有四种数据类型都有一个重要的时间维度；大多数数据跨越了过去50年，有些来源可以追溯到19世纪。TerraPop将使这些数据跨时间和空间互操作，传播给公众和多个研究团体，并为后代保存它们。由于缺乏国际上可比较的数据，对人口与环境之间相互作用的理解受到了阻碍。这种基础设施将扩大此类数据的质量和数量，同时使它们具有高度互操作性和易于访问。人口数据与环境数据紧密结合，将使我们能够描述人类和生态系统正在发生的变化。人口数据对于了解地球的变化至关重要。生物和气候过程；同样重要的是，关于气候和土地的数据为理解环境变化对人类行为的影响提供了必要的工具。通过创建一个在时间和空间上定位、分析和可视化世界人口和环境的框架，TerraPop将为调查变化的动因、评估其对人类社会和环境的影响以及制定应对未来挑战的政策提供前所未有的机会。数据收集及其分析工具将有助于教育和公众理解。它将允许教师将研究与教学结合起来，将发现的兴奋带入从小学到研究生院的课堂。更广泛地说，TerraPop将成为全球数据资源可持续扩展、维护和改进的典范。

Terra Populus: A Global Population/Environment Data Network (TerraPop) will develop organizational and technical infrastructure that will integrate, preserve, and disseminate data describing changes in the human population and environment over time. A plethora of high-quality environmental and population datasets are available, but they are widely dispersed, have incompatible or inadequate metadata, and have incompatible geographic identifiers. The project will enable researchers to identify and merge data from heterogeneous sources to study the relationships between human behavior and the natural world. TerraPop will focus on four specific kinds of data: (1) census and survey microdata describing the characteristics of individuals and their families and households; (2) aggregate census and survey data, describing the characteristics of places, including aggregate population characteristics, land use, and land cover; (3) remote-sensing data describing land cover and other environmental characteristics; and (4) climate data describing temperature, precipitation, and other climate-related variables. All four data types have an important temporal dimension; most of the data span the past five decades, and some sources reach back to the nineteenth century. TerraPop will make these data interoperable across time and space, disseminate them to the public and to multiple research communities, and preserve them for future generations. Understanding of interactions between population and the environment has been hampered by the dearth of internationally comparable data. This infrastructure will expand the quality and quantity of such data while making them highly interoperable and easily accessible. Population data closely integrated with data on the environment will allow us to describe the unfolding transformation of human and ecological systems. Data on the human population are crucial for understanding changes in the Earth?s biological and climate processes; equally important, data on climate and land provide essential tools for understanding the impact of environmental change on human behavior. By creating a framework for locating, analyzing, and visualizing the world's population and environment in time and space, TerraPop will provide unprecedented opportunities for investigating the agents of change, assessing their implications for human society and the environment, and developing policies to meet future challenges. The data collection and its analysis tools will contribute to education and public understanding. It will allow teachers to integrate research and teaching, bringing the excitement of discovery into the classroom from primary school to graduate school. More broadly, TerraPop will be a model for the sustainable expansion, maintenance, and improvement of a global data resource.