Census DP1 – Profile of General Demographic Characteristics¶
Source URL |
https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/2010/geo/tiger-data.html |
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Source Description |
US Census Demographic Profile 1 (DP1) County and Tract GeoDatabase. |
Download Size |
275 MB |
Temporal Coverage |
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PUDL Code |
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Issues |
Open Census DP1 – Profile of General Demographic Characteristics issues |
PUDL Database Tables¶
We’ve segmented the processed data into the following normalized data tables. Clicking on the links will show you a description of the table as well as the names and descriptions of each of its fields.
Background¶
In 2010 the US Census published its Demographic Profile 1 (DP1) data in a convenient geospatial database. This database included select demographic information at the state, county, and census tract level, along with the geometries of those geographic areas. The single file format was easy for us to archive and convert to SQLite for integration with other data in PUDL early on in the project.
It continues to be a convenient source of state and county boundaries for use in mapping and visualizations, and we use county-level population to provide context for the FERC-714 hourly electricity demand. However, it should not be considered canonical information since it’s from 2010 and more recent analogous data is available from the Census directly.
We convert the original GeoDatabase to SQLite using the ogr2ogr command-line tool that is part of the open source geospatial library GDAL. The resulting state, county, and tract level tables are then output to GeoParquet, which preserves the coordinate reference system and provides performant access to the vectorized geometries.
We rename the handful of columns that do not contain demographic data to be more legible
and consistent with the rest of the PUDL database. The ~170 demographic data columns are
left named by their standard Census data series IDs, which begin with dp, followed
by 7-digits.
Download additional documentation¶
Data available through PUDL¶
While the Census continues to compile similar demographic summary data, it has not published subsequent versions in the same single-file geodatabase format that was used for the 2010 data. As a result we have not updated this dataset since its initial integration into PUDL in 2020.
For more extensive and up-to-date US Census data, check out the list of available Census APIs.
Who submits this data?¶
This data is summarized from the 2010 decennial census.
What does the original data look like?¶
The original data is published as an ESRI GeoDatabase.
Notable Irregularities¶
The Census DP1 data we are using dates from the 2010 census. Jurisdiction boundaries, names, and IDs associated with individual counties and census tracts do change over time, so this data contains some minor discrepancies with present-day names, IDs, and boundaries. The population estimates and other demographic information it contains is also out of date. If you need more accurate geometries and demographics, you should go directly to canonical US Census data sources.
PUDL Data Transformations¶
To see the transformations applied to the data in each table, you can read the
docstrings for pudl.transform.censusdp1tract created for each table’s
respective transform function.