Last year, I wrote a post indicating where you can find open source data on the spatial distribution of population at reasonably high spatial resolutions. One of those sources is Sedac / Nasa hosted by CIESIN at Columbia University. Since my post (almost a year ago), these guys have done some important improvements to their methods and data, which now bring for the first time a global data set on population estimates by age and sex available at 30-arcsecond resolution.
They have also developed a new interactive tool that lets you estimate the total population within a polygon you draw on the map. I saw this tool on Twitter thanks to David McClendon.
Happy procrastinating, everyone!
