A new report from CIESIN and the Austrian Insitute of Technology has released an global assessment on light pollution on protected areas. The analysis is done to reveal how light pollution affects protected areas. Hence, two new variables was created from combining the global protected area distribution data and nighttime lights data: a Protected Area [...]

SEDAC at CIESIN has released a interactive mapper that visualizes the Human Influence and the Human Footprint dataset (version 2). The data has a global coverage and is available in 30 arc seconds grid cells and 1 km grid cells. Not much area that can be defined as untouched by humans anymore! The service is [...]

Globally consistent spatial road data sets are indeed scarce. Many of the available data sets has data with highly variable consistency. A new project hosted at CIESIN is due to release a new globally consistent road data set named gRoads. For road density mapping, this will provide a good alternative. However, the data is not [...]