The author has benefited greatly from the advice and input of many FAO staff, in particular, Ergin Ataman, René Gommes, Marina Zanetti, John Latham, Jippe Hoogeveen, Freddy Nachtergaele and José Aguilar-Manjarrez.
In addition, the author wishes to acknowledge the contributions made by staff members at a number of organizations for their technical advice, input, assistance in reviewing a preliminary draft of the document, and/or the provision of data. This includes staff at organizations such as: the WHO; the United Nations Cartographic Section; the various offices of the UNEP, including the WCMC, the Global International Waters Assessment project and the various UNEP-GRID field offices; the WRI; the CIESIN at Columbia University; the NASA -Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the USGS Sioux Falls and Flagstaff field office; the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center; the Cartographic Section of the US Department of State; and the other various government agencies primarily responsible for the provision and maintenance of the global datasets made available in the public domain.
The report includes reviews of some commercial data products and their graphical representations made during the data layer comparisons, which required agreements of the companies for their reproduction in this document The author wishes to both acknowledge and thank the following companies for permitting their data products to be represented and reviewed in this report: American Digital Cartography, ALLM GeoData, East View Cartographic, ESRI and Europa Technologies.
Finally, the general contributions of the UNGIWG members, particularly Steeve Ebener and Lorant Czaran, have been appreciated.
The author would like to thank Barbara Hall, Stephanie Vertecchi, Barbara De Filippis, Paul Hollingworth and Reuben Sessa for editing and the layout of the document.
This report was prepared as part of the FAO Poverty Mapping Project (GCP/INT/761/NOR), which was funded by the Government of Norway.
