Evaluating the total numbers of people at risk from infectious disease in the world requires
not just tabular population data, but data that are spatially explicit and global in extent at a
moderate resolution. This review describes the basic methods for constructing estimates of
global population distribution with attention to recent advances in improving both spatial and
temporal resolution. To evaluate the optimal resolution for the study of disease, the native
resolution of the data inputs as well as that of the resulting outputs are discussed …