Human actions have caused substantial alterations to the Earth, transforming the landscape, affecting ecosystem patterns and processes, driving biodiversity loss, altering global hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, amplifying resource exploitation and environmental deterioration, and contributing to climate change 1– 3. The generated gridded population datasets and the production and validation methods are described here. Separating urban and rural areas and excluding non-inhabitable areas were the most important factors for improving the overall accuracy. The models were validated with census tract and county subdivision population data in 2000 and were applied to generate five sets of 22 historical population maps from 1790–2010. Five models of increasing complexity were evaluated. This study generated 1-km decadal population maps for the conterminous US from 1790 to 2010 using parsimonious models based on natural suitability, socioeconomic desirability, and inhabitability. However, the complex relationship between population distribution and various influencing factors coupled with limited data availability make it a challenge to reconstruct human population distribution over timescales of centuries.

Where do people live, and how has this changed over timescales of centuries? High-resolution spatial information on historical human population distribution is of great significance to understand human-environment interactions and their temporal dynamics.

Us density population map