Journal of Map & Geography Libraries names TerraPop 2016’s best paper

The Journal of Map & Geography Libraries revealed the winner of the 2016 Best Paper Award: “Terra Populus: Workflows for Integrating and Harmonizing Geospatial Population and Environmental Data,” by Tracy A. Kugler, David C. Van Riper, Steven M. Manson, David A. Haynes II, Joshua Donato and Katie Stinebaugh.

“The goal of TerraPop is to enable research, learning and policy analysis by providing integrated spatiotemporal data describing people and their environment,” the authors say.

The paper describes TerraPop‘s collection strategies, details the geospatial workflows involved in preparing data for ingest into the project database and those used to transform data across formats for dissemination, and discusses the system used to capture and manage provenance metadata throughout the project, according to the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries. A key aspect of the project is the development of global current and historical administrative unit boundaries that can be linked to census data.

The Journal of Map and Geography Libraries Best Paper Award is presented annually to the best paper published in the previous year. The evaluation criteria for the award are the papers’ quality of research and writing, interest in the topic by current and future readers and the likely influence of the article on future research, the journal says.