Downscaling Population Information with a High Resolution Land Cover Data Set for Spain.

This presentation introduces a high resolution and complex land cover use recently released for Spain, SIOSE. The Minimum Mapping Unit (MMU) for artificial cover is 1 Ha; which solves many of the problems raised by the poor resolution of Corine Land Cover (CLC) in downscaling population density. After presenting this land cover data set we offer an application to downscaling population density in Spain by merging SIOSE with census tracts, about 35.000. We first simplify the complex land use data by identifying the covers that are able to hold residential population, taken into account the highly concentrated population in Spain in big cities or in small settlements. Given the small scale at which we work we get pure classes, by statistical modeling these at provincial level we apply similar methods used by Gallego (2010) with CLC at an European level but getting a much more realistic population grid for Spain.