Three centuries of global population growth: a spatial referenced population (density) database for 1700-2000

The Earth's surface has changed considerably over the past centuries. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1700s, humans from the "Old World" started to colonize the "New World". The colonization processes lead to major changes in global land use and land cover. Large parts of the original land cover have been altered (e.g., deforestation), leading to extra emissions of GHG's to the atmosphere and enhancing global climate change. The spatial and temporal aspects are still not very well known. More and more global integrated environmental assessments concerning global sustainability require long time series of global change indicators, of which population is an important one. This study presents an update of the geo-referenced historical population maps for the period 1700–2000, part of the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), which can be used in integrated models of global change and/or global sustainability.