The Human Ecology Grid Database: A Comprehensive Multi-Domain Global Spatial Dataset for Environmental, Ethnolinguistic, and Socioeconomic Research

The Human Ecology Grid is an integrated, spatially indexed geospatial database designed to support interdisciplinary research on human–environment interactions and human behavioral diversity. It harmonizes curated open datasets across multiple domains — including climate, linguistics, socioeconomics, infrastructure, biodiversity, and human impact — within a globally consistent equal-area hexagonal grid. The database offers global coverage at multiple spatial resolutions (50–500 km), supporting both longitudinal analyses (1981–2023) and cross-sectional studies. A fully reproducible, metadata-driven processing pipeline ensures data provenance and extensibility. Variables and Sources The Human Ecology Grid integrates data from a range of third-party sources. Users are responsible for citing the relevant source datasets in addition to this database. A full list of variables and their corresponding sources is provided in variables.xlsx and a list of accompanying references is in references.bib Data Presets and Usage The database is available at multiple spatial resolutions, both as a longitudinal (yearly) and cross-secional (snapshot) dataset. The data presets (e.g. grid-500km-yearly indicate the specific combination of these parameters). For use within R, we recommend the companion humanEcologyGrid package. File Structure Each data preset uses the same consistent file structure ├── grid.geojson.xz ├── grid-adjacency.csv.xz ├── data │ └── .../data.parquet └── checksums.sha256 grid.geojson.xz is the grid cell geometry as a compressed GeoJSON file grid-adjacency.csv.xz is a compressed CSV file with grid cell adjacency information data contains Parquet files with variable values (we use Hive-style partitioning for longigudinal datasets) Citing Source Data Please make sure to cite the source data when using the Human Ecology Grid in your research. Consult variables.xlsx and references.bib for more information.