Earth is home to more than eight billion people who depend on the planet’s resources for food, shelter, wealth, safety and other essential needs. Instruments aboard Earth-observing satellites can track human activities, such as the conversion of natural land to urban areas, the cultivation of agricultural land, and patterns of human movement and migration. Combining these remotely sensed data with data collected by national and sub-national government agencies (such as population surveys, disease monitoring, biodiversity assessments, and all manner of other information) enables investigations into the impact of human activities on Earth. Additionally, these data are a vital resource for managing disaster response, such as using nighttime lights data to monitor power outages following severe weather or thermal anomaly data to track the movement of wildfires near populated areas.

NASA’s human dimension data products include hourly fossil-fuel emissions, inland water measurements, deforested area maps, seasonal hunting conditions, road network maps, wildfire burn scar assessments, human population measurements, air pollution tracking, socioeconomic and demographic household surveys, and vulnerability to climate change analysis.