LandScan provides the population value of every square kilometer of landmass on Earth - approximately 150M square kilometers. The technology uses innovative algorithms to determine population based on satellite images of buildings, roads, and other manmade structures along with other sources like local census data, geographical information such as the slope of the land as well as the intensity of surrounding agriculture.

LandScan 2011 represents a significant improvement over LandScan 2010 for the following reasons:

• Many countries around the world conduct their national census decennially on "0" year making 2010 a particularly rich year for census data
• ORNL developed a "Settlement Mapper Tool", which rapidly delineates and characterizes settlements using high-resolution imagery. The tool was used extensively for verification and validation, for refining urban built-up areas, for adding thousands of smaller villages and populated places, and for the identification and mitigation of input data anomalies to improve the spatial precision and values of the population distribution.
• Changes to the population distribution for Japan include impacts due to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant incident. Resultant population displacements including shelters and temporary housing were integrated into the distribution.
• Updates were made to the country grid to reflect changes in global political boundaries and sovereignty, such as Sudan and South Sudan.

"Through East View's LandScan web application, we have seen how East View has made LandScan, one of ORNL's most successfully licensed products and now in its thirteenth year, more accessible to a wider group of researchers," said ORNL Director Thom Mason.