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

地球人口：全球人口/环境数据网络(TerraPop)将开发组织和技术基础设施，以整合、保存和传播描述人类人口和环境随时间变化的数据。有太多高质量的环境和人口数据集可用，但它们广泛分散，元数据不兼容或不充分，并且地理标识符不兼容。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将专注于四种特定类型的数据：(1)描述个人及其家庭和家庭特征的普查和调查微观数据；(2)描述地点特征的汇总普查和调查数据，包括总体人口特征、土地利用和土地覆盖；(3)描述土地覆盖和其他环境特征的遥感数据；以及(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，有些数据来源可以追溯到19世纪。TerraPop将使这些数据能够跨时间和空间互操作，向公众和多个研究社区传播，并为子孙后代保存它们。由于缺乏国际可比数据，人们对人口与环境之间相互作用的理解一直受到阻碍。这一基础设施将扩大这类数据的质量和数量，同时使它们高度可互操作和易于获取。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。人口数据对于理解地球的变化至关重要--S生物和气候过程；同样重要的是，气候和土地数据为理解环境变化对人类行为的影响提供了必不可少的工具。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了解。它将允许教师将研究和教学相结合，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.