ABSTRACT

This interdisciplinary research project will examine the different demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic factors and processes that influence population levels and distributions at different scales ranging from local to national. The investigators will develop a new, multi-scale modeling framework to assess the relative importance of these factors and processes and increase knowledge regarding how and why the spatial distribution of the human population changes over time. Project results will help improve projections of possible future population change, and they will enhance theories and methods in demography, geography, economics, and sociology as well as in topically focused realms, such as disaster preparedness and environmental change. Project findings will be disseminated broadly through major interdisciplinary and disciplinary journals, while and the methods used to generate them will be made available from long-term publicly accessible repositories.

Understanding how and why the spatial distribution of the human population changes over time, both across large geographic regions and at the local scale, is fundamental to a variety of scholarly and policy arenas, including migration, economic development, environmental change, and the spread of infectious disease. A significant obstacle to a holistic understanding of spatial population distribution and change is that the determinants of change act at a range of scales. These scale-dependent determinants interact with one another, complicating both theory and modeling efforts. This research project aims to improve the understanding of the dynamics of spatial population change by bridging geographic scales and scientific disciplines to develop a novel explanatory framework. The investigators will bring together theoretical perspectives from demography, geography, and economics, and they will use those perspectives in the conduct of a multi-scale analysis of spatial population distribution and its determinants in the U.S., Mexico, and India. These sites have been chosen to represent a range of socioeconomic conditions and behaviors as well as a range of data quality and availability. The investigators will assess how spatial population outcomes result from an interrelated set of influences at the national, aggregate urban/rural, city, and local levels, and they will assess how the relative importance of these influences varies across countries at different levels of economic development and within countries by socio-economic conditions, demographic behaviors, and geographic characteristics. Hypotheses will be tested using several decades of spatial population data that will be merged with other economic and demographic and geophysical data in a spatially explicit, quantitative framework. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.

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