The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) project is supported by European Commission, Joint Research Center and Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy. The GHSL produces new global spatial information, evidence-based analytics, and knowledge describing the human presence in the planet.
The GHSL relies on the design and implementation of new spatial data mining technologies allowing to process automatically and extract analytics and knowledge from large amount of heterogeneous data including: global, fine-scale satellite image data streams, census data, and crowd sources or volunteering geographic information sources. Spatial data reporting objectively and systematically about the presence of population and built-up infrastructures are necessary for any evidence-based modelling or assessing of i) human and physical exposure to threats as environmental contamination and degradation, natural disasters and conflicts, ii) impact of human activities on ecosystems, and iii) access to resources.
This spatial raster dataset depicts the distribution and density of residential population, expressed as the number of people per cell. Resident population from censuses for year 2011 provided by Eurostat were disaggregated from source zones to grid cells, informed by land use and land cover from Corine Land Cover Refined 2006 and by the distribution and density of built-up as mapped in the European Settlement Map 2016 layer.
Freire, Sergio; Halkia, Matina; Pesaresi, Martino (2026): GHS population grid, derived from EUROSTAT census data (2011) and ESM R2016 - OBSOLETE RELEASE. European Commission, Joint Research Centre [Dataset] doi: 10.2905/JRC.FANRB5R PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/jrc-ghsl-ghs_pop_eurostat_europe_r2016a
ESMGHSLPopulation gridregional map
GHS resident population grid, derived from Census datasets for 2011 (Eurostat), Corine Land Cover Refined 2006 (CLC06rV2) and European Settlement Map 2016 (ESM 2016).
Values are expressed as decimals (Float). The data is published at 100m in LAEA ETRS89 (EPSG:3035). The compressed ZIP file contain TIF files and short documentation.
GHSL Project website
The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service portal offers the access to the ESM 2016, which has been used to produce the population grid.
JRC's expertise in automatic extraction of information from satellite imagery for the mapping of human settlements has been further enhanced with state-of-the-art population disaggregation methodologies with an aim to provide fine resolution population data across Europe, where detailed population data do not exist, to enable evaluation of current, and planning of future European policies in the context of territorial cohesion. The work described in this paper, summarizes the background, methodology, experiments, reference data, and results, which has been performed towards a wall-to-wall population grid in Europe at 1 km2 of resolution.
Eurostat recently published population data obtained from EU member states at 1 km2 of resolution. In these countries where disaggregated population data was not available, the methods and experiments described in this paper produced results for eight European countries (Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta, Montenegro, Serbia, FYROM, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Iceland). However, the method was developed in the context of a general need for global and European population data, based on the concept that settlement data can be a good proxy for where people live. Land use was taken in consideration as ancillary reference to weight population according to the functional characteristics of the settlement area. Input was provided by census or administrative-level data, whatever best was available in each country in question.
In particular, attention was given to the masking or weighting of certain land use classes according to the available data provided for model development. Statistical evaluation of alternative methods of weighting and masking land use classes was performed. The quality of the input data provided and the availability of ancillary land use data in Europe was key.
Preservation of population counts was observed. Issues regarding the quality and types of population input data, as well as discrepancies in the spatial domain, were challenging. In the case of Cyprus, particular attention was given to the specific political context. In the case of Luxembourg, the availability of detailed country-wide land use data (Urban Atlas), yielded optimized results.
The population grid is used as input to the GHSL settlement model for Europe. The settlement model currently defines settlement types in Europe, based on the OECD city definition, and additional definitions provided by the GHSL model. The GHSL definitions for rural and peri-urban settlements refine the sparsely inhabited areas used by the European Commission to describe rural settlements, by the physical characteristics of the settlement and population density.
| From date | To date |
|---|---|
| 2011-01-01 | 2011-12-30 |
