Population Stripes

Julien Gaffuri, a cartographer at Eurostat, has created an interactive map which allows you to place stripes of any size and orientation on a map of Europe and discover the percentage of the continent's population living within the area covered by the stripe.

Julien's Population Stripe map uses population data from the statistical office of the European Union, and provides some very iinteresting ways to explore and visualize population density across Europe. For example the animation above shows the percentage of the population in Europe in horizontal stripes from north to south. It shows how little of the EU's population live in the north of the continent. 

This can be visualized even more clearly by changing the size of the stripes:

We can adjust the orientation of the stripe to also explore the proportion of the EU population which lives in the eastern and western half of the continent. This reveals that the east-west split is a little more even than the north-west split. 

Julien Gaffuri has also created an interactive map which allows you to use circles to explore the EU's population, instead of stripes. His Population Circle map allows you to place a circle of any size anywhere on a map of Europe to discover the percentage of the population who live within the area of the circle.