We are thrilled to share a project we’ve been collaborating with the Social Impact Partnerships and Data for Good teams at Meta on to create a new interactive map tool for their High Resolution Settlement Layer (HRSL) Dataset. The explorer is live at populationexplorer.org and we invite you to explore and play with this phenomenal dataset.
This map explorer highlights the High Resolution Settlement Layer Dataset at a variety of scales, allowing you to explore the dataset like never before. The preexisting data portals offer the data at the country scale via Humanitarian Data Exchange or AWS. This data at the country scale can be immensely powerful, but we wanted to provide smaller scale regions to make the data easier to work with.
We also developed a way to draw custom boundaries from this dataset. This provides a way to sift through this incredibly detailed dataset at a scale without having to download the data first. We see this as a critical tool for getting detailed population and demographic statistics in whatever region you need to identify.
It’s been a pleasure working with these teams on this project after our previous collaboration on COVID-19 Mobility Dashboard, using Data for Good’s country-level mobility data in conjunction with Direct Relief and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. This particular dataset, the High Resolution Population Density dataset is widely used in disaster response and humanitarian aid. We hope you take a look and use the Explorer!