Feature class map with country-regional population density?

[MathiasKnudsen]

Hi Forum users!

I'm a bit uncertain concerning whether I'm posting in the right place or not, so forgive me if I'm way off here. The questions is quite simple, though:

Where do I find a world map with countries defined as polygons including some sort of sub-national division (regions/municipalities/other units) and the population density of the different sub-national units? The purpose is to map events with X,Y-coordinates (earthquakes longitude/latitude) and then spatial join information about the sub-national unit, the population density of the unit and the country-name. That way I'll hopefully end up with a table with (at least) the following columns: 1) FID, 2) Long, 3) Lat, 4) Country, 5) Name of sub-national unit, 6) Population density of sub-national unit (of course area and total population of the sub-national unit would work as well).

I have browsed the "Add data from ArcGIS Online" without any luck so far, but I'm wondering if there might be additional materiel elsewhere.

Have a great day, and thanks in advance for any help!

Best regards,

Mathias Knudsen, University of Copenhagen

[AdrianWelsh]

Have you tried Natural Earth?

Natural Earth

It looks like it might provide what you are looking for.

It might help if you delete your duplicate post

(this one Feature class map with country-regional population density? )

[MathiasKnudsen]

So sorry about the duplicate post! I thought I could edit the original post without duplicating.

The Natural Earth-data is really good in terms of states and provinces, but I'm not certain I can figure out how to get the population density mapped on the provinces, but I'll definately look into it! Thanks for the help.

[JenniferMcCall4]

You could try this layer package http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=d86e32ea12a64727b9e94d6f820123a2

This is the World Administrative Divisions.  It breaks countries down into provinces/states.  There is no population density, but you could find population data and then do some spatial analysis to determine the density.

[MathiasKnudsen]

Thank you for your answer! I've looked at that specific package previously, but I couldn't quite get my head around adding the population density for the differnet provinces as I haven't found any feature classes with data on a sub-country level. Any thoughts about this?

[MathiasKnudsen]

Soooo, I've found this source which might be useful, but I can't figure out whether it's possible to get the data from the grids onto the province-map.

Downloads » Population Density Grid, v3: Gridded Population of the World (GPW), v3 | SEDAC

What kind of data format (file-type) am I looking for in general?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[HelenPlattner]

I'm not sure what your question is, from the above it seems you have both the province level boundaries and the population already as density, is your question whether to use the .bil, .ascii, or grid format? If so, grid works well for me in ArcGIS. Just remember to project both sets of data into the same projected coordinate system as your area of interest before doing any analysis. The resolution and year choices will depend on your purpose for the data.

[MathiasKnudsen]

I'm terrible sorry if I'm not being specific enough. Truth is that I'm not experienced at all with ArcMap but I'll really trying to get some data ready for a university project.

Right now I have the province level boundaries in one layer as a shapefile feature class and another layer with the population density as a Geodatabase Raster Dataset (ascii). My problem right now is that I don't know how to get the data from the raster dataset merged with the shapefile. The optimal outcome would be another column of data in the province-layer with the mean population density of each region.

I have tried messing a bit around with the data, but I'm not sure if I'm even close. I have an attribute table with objectID, value and count, where the value indicates the population density and the count indicates the amount of grids with that value, as far as I know. I don't know how to add that data spatially to the provinces.

Any help as to which tools or which approach I could use is really greatly appreciated!

Edit: I do not have the Spatial Analyst Tools which would otherwise appear to be a viable approach to me. I've also tried to convert the raster to polygon, but I get an error message when I try to (could that be because of an excessive amount of data?).

[HelenPlattner]

First thing you need to be aware of is coordinate systems please see the information here: What are map projections?—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop

The next thing I advise is to take the free classes offered for the product version you are using:

Under Esri Training

Review:

Basics of Geographic Coordinate Systems

Getting Started with GIS where you will learn location query basics

While there are a lot of great tools in the Spatial Analyst toolbox you are looking to do a basic Select by Location query and the above question sounds like you want to use ArcGIS like an excel spreadsheet. While possible, it is the long way round and not the best use of the software. Invest the seven hours in the above tutorials, check out the online and in software help files, and also check out videos posted on YouTube for steps you want to 'see' in action. You will then be able to make much better decisions and complete your task quickly. Good luck with your project.