Australian Aboriginal Population Density

In contribution to the #30daymapchallenge on Twitter, by Topi Tjukanov, I pulled together some ABS 2016 census data on the population density of Aboriginal Australians vs the rest. As expected the densest population of Aboriginal Australians is in the northern parts of Australia, Arnhem Land, Cape York Peninsula and the Kimberley and also major urban centres. The northern areas also contain a higher proportion of Aboriginal Australians over the rest.

Each dot on the map represents one person, and whilst not locating that person accurately, each area—in this case ABS SA2 regions—displays the density of people. Red dots are Aboriginal Australians, blue dots are the rest.

As you can imagine, 27 million or so points is a lot of data to display on a map at any one time and the sheer volume of the data—over 3 gb in size—makes it difficult to render on a web map in real time. The best solution to display this huge volume of data was vector tiles, a bite-size tile that contains a subset of the data. Processing was very straightforward using MapBox’s Tippeecanoe tool, then uploading the generated vector tile datasets to MapBox’s servers. the combined tilesets weighed in just of 300 mb.

The final web map can be viewed here