Population
Earth at night
NASA Black Marble: city lights and gas flares as seen from orbit, a picture of electrified settlement.
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Population density
Where people live, gridded: NASA SEDAC GPW and WorldPop, models fitted to censuses, not a headcount of every street.
Gridded Population of the World (SEDAC / CIESIN) and WorldPop spread census counts onto a grid with satellite covariates. UN World Population Prospects give the national totals those grids are often aligned to. Night lights (see Earth at night) are a related brightness proxy, not a census.
Source
NASA SEDAC Gridded Population of the World; WorldPop; UN WPP
Vintage: 2020
https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v4
License
SEDAC GPW has academic-use terms; WorldPop is typically CC BY. The preview is Wikimedia’s Countries and regions by population density (Junuxx, CC BY-SA 3.0). Open SEDAC’s map viewer for the population grid.
How to read it
Bright or dark cells are estimated people per square kilometre. Rural sparsity can hide large absolute populations. City cores saturate any color scale.
Caveats
Censuses are uneven and sometimes old. Conflict zones and informal settlements are hard to count. A grid is an estimate. The preview is a Wikimedia country-and-region density map, not the SEDAC grid itself.
Open source map →Related maps
Population
World population
How many people live in each country on 1 July 2024, from the UN medium-variant estimates.
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Population
Cities and towns
Urban centres, towns and rural land in the GHSL settlement grid for 2020.
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Population
Built-up surface
How much of each cell is built-up surface in the 2020 GHSL grid.
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Population
Population growth
The 2024 annual rate of population change in each country, from the same UN medium variant.
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