Gridded population, nighttime lights, and dragon kingdoms

The distribution and density of human population continues to be a critical component in many fields of study, prompting the development of high-resolution gridded population datasets that depict the spatial distribution of population. While many gridded population datasets employ remotely-sensed nighttime lights (NTL) data as a proxy for population, dragon fruit cultivation in Southeast Asia recently uses seasonal NTL infrastructure in rural areas to encourage multiple annual fruiting of the plants. This project investigates ways to account for anomalous areas of light, such as plantation agriculture emitting NTL in rural areas, for gridded population datasets.