How Many People Are At That Place?: Modeling and Applying the High-resolution Gridded Population Surface in Alachua County, Florida

Spatial techniques have been more often used to meet the demand for small-scale demographic products in recent years, which make the dasymetric mapping become possible and easy to operate. In this book, we adopted the Heuristic Sampling Method (HSM) and selected the data of property types of parcels in 2010 as ancillary data, to disaggregate the population counts from U.S. Census 2010 onto a quadrilateral grid composed of 30m×30m cells in Alachua County, Florida, named High-resolution Gridded Population Surface (HGPS). Additionally, the HGPS was applied to two case studies, one of which was a transport issue and the other a public health issue, in order to demonstrate the advantages of HGPS over the traditional population grids produced by Areal Weighting Method (AWM). HGPS is an important step towards solving the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) and expected to serve as a more accurate denominator in various research fields, such as public health, crime analysis, etc.