Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3): National Identifier Grid

The Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3): National Identifier Grid is derived from the land area grid to create a raster surface where pixels (cells) that cover the same country or territory have the same value. Note that the countries and territories are not official representations of countries boundaries; rather, they represent the area covered by the statistical data as provided. GPWv3 is produced by the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) in collaboration with Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT).
To provide a raster representation of nation-states in GPWv3 for use in aggregating population data.