Enhancing activity and population mapping : exploratory research project interim report

ENACT ("ENhancing ACTivity and population mapping") is a JRC Exploratory Research Project involving various units at the JRC, and spanning 2 years (2016-2017). Current knowledge of population distribution is still very limited even for Europe. Existing spatial datasets refer only to 'residential' population distribution, and more complete datasets reflecting spatiotemporal population variations are still lacking. Yet, this type of information is essential for multiple purposes such as analysis of human exposure, regional and urban planning and impact assessment of new investments or infrastructures. ENACT aims at contributing to fill the existing knowledge gap by producing consistent, seamless, multi-temporal and high-resolution population distribution grid maps for Europe that take into account major daily and seasonal population variations. Most of ENACT's tasks consist of exploring and combining new and unconventional datasets which can be useful to map spatiotemporal population distribution. In the herein interim report we describe with some detail ENACT's scope, objectives and workflow, and make an account of the state of the work conducted so far, with highlight to the tasks related to the literature review, activity mapping, and collection of population statistics at regional level.