LandCast Projected Population 2050

Developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the LandCast 2050 High-Resolution Population Projection models future national-level human population densities. The models estimate the probability of a population being at a particular location, which measures where people will likely be in the future, not necessarily their places of residence.

The LandCast 2050 data set is an empirically-informed spatial distribution of projected population of the contiguous U.S. for 2050 compiled on a 30” x 30” latitude/longitude grid. Population projections of county level numbers were developed using a modified version of the U.S. Census’ projection methodology-with the U.S. Census’ official projection as the benchmark. Projected census counts were apportioned to each grid cell based on locally adaptive likelihood coefficients, which are based on land cover, slope, road proximity, distances to larger cities, a moving average of current population, and other data sets. The LandCast 2050 data set was developed as part of ORNL Global Population Project for estimating ambient populations at risk.