Spatial accuracy evaluation of population density grid disaggregations with corine landcover

Abstract

The article elaborates on the spatial disaggregation approach of the 1 km population density grid created by the European Forum for Geostatistics in a defined study area where accurate population reference data are available. The chapter presents an approach to disaggregate the population grid to target resolution of 100 and 500 m respectively and describes the evaluation methodology. The resulting population grids are evaluated with respect to the reference population dataset of the Austrian Bureau of Statistics. In addition, the results are evaluated regarding their correlation to the reference or a random population dataset. The results indicate that there is evidence that the disaggregated population grid with 500 m resolution is more accurate than the 100 m population grid. In addition, the 100 m disaggregated population raster shows more correlation with the random population grid. Furthermore, the chapter shows that densely populated zones are estimated with higher accuracy than medium and sparsely populated areas.