Abstract

Using Rasterization to Overcome Boundary Changes
Track: Census
Authors: Andy Bradford

A study of land values before and after the US Civil War encountered a problem - county boundaries changed between Censuses in large parts of the country. Counties had split, merged, or traded pieces of land, making straightforward comparison of average land values difficult.
To overcome this problem, the vector layers for each Census were rasterized, and the rasters were combined in order to produce a raster of difference values across the country.