The National Racial Geography Dataset (NRGD2020) provides a high-resolution racial database for the conterminous US in 2020. The NRGD2020 utilizes Racial Landscape (RL) methodology to provide a comprehensive resource for visualization and quantitative analysis of racial geography.
NRGD2020 consists of a collection of precalculated GIS layers that can be used for quantification and visualization of racial distribution for any place in the conterminous United States at the resolution of 30-meters. In addition to 30-m resolution datasets, it also includes 10 racial diversity and 10 segregation grids depicting the level of diversity or segregation at the scale of 72km, 36km, 24km, 18km, 12km, 9km, 6km, 3km, 1.5km, 0.75km. All layers are available as GeoTiffs (see table below).
Detailed information about the NRGD2020 dataset is described in
A.Dmowska, T. Stepinski. 2024. Quantification and visualization of US racial geography using the National Racial Geography Dataset 2020. (Paper submitted to PLOS One) [preprint from SocArxiv]
The use cases of NRGD2020 are described in the paper:
A.Dmowska, T.F. Stepinski.2024. Mapping and analyzing racial geography in the United States using National Racial Geography Dataset. Annual Meeting of Population Association of America, Columbus, OH, April 17-20 2024. [paper] [poster]
GIS layers included in the NRGD2020 collection
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| RL image | 30-meters | An RGB image that provides a US-wide visualization of racial geography. Unzipped file has 50.5 GB. | Visualization | Download zip archive: 3.8 GB |
| RL grid racial ID | 30-meters | A raster in which each cell has a label corresponding to one of six races (1- American Indians, 2 - Asians, 3 - Blacks, 4 - Hispanics/Lationo, 5 - others (people who declared two or more races), 6 - Whites). Unzipped file has 16.8GB. | Quantification: an input to the raceland package in R for calculating segregation and diversity metrics for an arbitrary area. | Download zip archive: 787 MB |
| RL grid population density | 30-meters | A raster in which each cell has a value of local population density. Unzipped file has 67.3GB. | Quantification: an input to the raceland package in R for calculating segregation and diversity metrics for an arbitrary area. | Download zip archive: 3.8 GB |
| Diversity grids | 72-km, 36-km, 24-km, 18-km, 12-km, 9-km, 6-km, 3-km, 1.5-km, 0.75-km | Rasters showing spatial variability of diversity over the conterminous US at ten different length scales. Diversity is measured by the Hill's number that depicts the significant number of racial groups present in an area. Unzipped directory has 135.4MB. | Visualization and quantification. Allows to visualize or quantify dependence of racial diversity on length scale for any arbitrary areas. | Download zip archive: 17.9 MB |
| Segregation grids | 72-km, 36-km, 24-km, 18-km, 12-km, 9-km, 6-km, 3-km, 1.5-km, 0.75-km | Rasters showing spatial variability of segregation over the conterminous US at ten different length scales. Segregation is measured by the mutual information MI. Unzipped directory has 135.4MB. | Visualization and quantification. Allows to visualize or quantify dependence of racial segregation on length scale for any arbitrary areas. | Download zip archive: 18.7 MB. |
Examples of application
The examples below illustrate how the National Racial Geography Dataset (NRGD2020), along with the R package raceland, can be employed to address racial geography problems similar to those examined in demographic literature. The examples are based on Atlanta dataset.
- Introduction to "Using raceland package and National Racial Geography Dataset to analyze racial geography in the United States"
- Example 1: Comparing racial diversity and segregation metrics between different parts of metropolitan statistical area (MSA).
- Example 2: Segregation profiles.
- Example 3: Calculating racial diversity and segregation metrics for the user-defined scale.
- Example 4: Calculating racial segregation metrics for a particular racial group.
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