Disaggregating population density of the European Union with CORINE Land Cover

This paper describes and compares six disaggregation methods that have been used to represent as a grid with 100 m resolution the available population data in the European Union (EU) at commune level. The main ancillary information for the downscaling process comes from CORINE Land Cover (CLC), a land cover map distributed by the European Environment Agency (EEA). Information provided by the Eurostat point survey LUCAS (Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey) has been also integrated for the parameter estimation of some of the approaches tested. Accurate grid population data for 1 km cells were provided by the statistical institutes of Austria, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Estonia and Sweden. These data provided the basic reference to quantify the accuracy of each method. The best results have been obtained with a modified version of the so-called limiting variable method; the application of this method has been possible thanks to the national reference data. Other methods could be applied without using the reference grid data to estimate the parameters; among them a method based on logit regression gave the best results. Compared with the traditional choropleth maps that represent a homogeneous density in each commune, the accuracy improvement of the disaggregated maps ranges between 20% and 67% (between 46% and 67% for the best method). The accuracy analysis suggests that the quality of results depends more on the amount and worth of available data than on the methodological choice.

JRC.H.4 - Monitoring Agricultural Resources