When I’m making global thematic maps, I usually turn to Natural Earth. They provide country polygons and boundary lines, as well as features like cities and rivers, at several different scales. I always reference it in workshops that I teach, including the 2-week GIS Institute that I participated in earlier this month. It’s a solid, free data source and a good example for illustrating how scale and generalization work in cartography. It’s a “natural choice”, as they provide boundaries that depict the way the world actually looks.
I also discussed aesthetics and map design during the Institute. What if you don’t necessarily care about representing the boundaries exactly the way they are? If you rely on the map reader’s knowledge of the relative shape of the countries and their position on the globe, and you employ good labeling, you can choose boundaries that are more artistic and fun (provided that your only goal is making a basic thematic map and it’s not being published in a stodgy journal).
Project Linework is part of Something About Maps, an excellent blog by Daniel Huffman. The project consists of different series of public domain boundary files that have been generalized to provide interesting and visually attractive alternatives to standard features. The gallery contains a sample image and brief description of each series, including details on geographic coverage. Most of the series cover just North America or select portions of the world.
The three I’ll mention below are global in coverage. They come in shapefile and geojson formats, are projected in World Gall Stereographic (ESRI 54016), and include line and polygon coverages. The attribute tables have fields for ISO country codes, which are standard unique identifiers that allow for table joins for thematic mapping. I took my map of Wheat and Meslin Exports from Ukraine from an earlier post to create the following examples.
With the Wargames series, the world has been rendered using the little hexagon grids familiar to many war board gamers, and plenty of non-war gamers for that matter (think Settlers of Catan). Hexes are a an alternative to grids for determining adjacency.
Project Linework: Wargames
Moriarty Hand is a more whimsical interpretation. It was drawn by hand by tracing line work from Natural Earth. The end result is more organic compared to Wargames. It comes in two scales, small and large (with an example of the latter below):
Project Linework: Moriarty Hand
My personal favorite is 1981. It’s inspired by the basic polygon shapes that you would have seen in early computer graphics. When I was little I remember loading a DOS-based atlas program from a floppy disk, and slowly panning across a CGA monochrome screen as the machine chunked away to render countries that looked like these. Good if you’re looking for a retro vibe.
I’ve also received a number of questions this semester about animal observation and tracking data. Since I usually study people and not animals, I was a bit out of my element and had some homework to do. If you’ve ever watched nature shows, you’ve seen scientists tagging animals with collars or bands to track them by radio or satellite, or setting up cameras to record them. Many scientists upload their GPS coordinate data into publicly accessible repositories for others to download and use.
I’ve written a short, three-part document that I’ve posted on our tutorials page: GIS Data Sources for Wildlife Tutorial. In the first part, I provide summaries, links, and guidance on using large portals like Movebank and Zoatrack that include many species from all over the world (wild and domestic), as well a government repositories including NOAA’s National Center for Environment Information Geoportal and the National Park Service’s Data Store. The second part focuses on search strategies, crawling the web and combing through academic literature in library databases to find additional data. Since these datasets are highly diffuse, it’s worth going beyond the portals to see what else you can discover.
I describe how you can add and visualize this data in QGIS and ArcGIS Pro in the third and final part. Wildlife data comes packaged in a number of formats; in some cases you’ll find shapefiles or geodatabases that you can readily add and visualize, but more often than not the data is packaged in a plain CSV / TXT format. This requires you to plot the coordinates (X for longitude, Y for latitude) to create a dot map of the observations. Data files will often contain a number of individual animals, which can be uniquely identified with a tag ID, allowing you to symbolize the points by category so you have a different color or symbol for each individual. Alternatively, there might be separate data files for each individual, that you could add and symbolize differently. The files will contain either a sequential integer or a timestamp that indicates the order of the observations. With one field that indicates the order and another that identifies each individual, you can use a Points to Line or Points to Path tool to generate lines (tracks or trajectories) from the points (observations or detections).
You can see where dingos in Queensland, Australia are going in the screenshot below, which displays individual observation points, and the screenshot in the header of this post where the points were connected to form paths. I obtained the data from ZoaTrack and used QGIS for mapping. Check out the tutorial for details on how to find and map your favorite animals.
I’ve been receiving more questions about geospatial data sources as the semester draws to a close. I’ll describe some sources that I haven’t used extensively before in the next couple of posts, beginning with data on bilateral trade: imports and exports between countries. We’ll look at the IMF’s Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) and the UN’s COMTRADE database. Both sources provide web-based portals, APIs, and bulk downloading. I’ll focus on the portals.
IMF Direction of Trade Statistics
IMF DOTS provides monthly, quarterly, and annual import and export data, represented as total dollar values for all goods exchanged. The annual data goes back to 1947, while the monthly / quarterly data goes back to 1960. All countries that are part of the IMF are included, plus a few others. Data for exports are published on a Free and On Board (FOB) price basis, while imports are published on a Cost, Insurance, Freight (CIF) price basis. Here are definitions for each term, quoted directly from the OECD’s Statistical Glossary:
The f.o.b. price (free on board price) of exports and imports of goods is the market value of the goods at the point of uniform valuation, (the customs frontier of the economy from which they are exported). It is equal to the c.i.f. price less the costs of transportation and insurance charges, between the customs frontier of the exporting (importing) country and that of the importing (exporting) country.
The c.i.f. price (i.e. cost, insurance and freight price) is the price of a good delivered at the frontier of the importing country, including any insurance and freight charges incurred to that point, or the price of a service delivered to a resident, before the payment of any import duties or other taxes on imports or trade and transport margins within the country.
There are a few different ways to browse and search for data. Start with the Data Tables tab at the top, and Exports and Imports by Areas and Countries. The default table displays monthly exports by region and country for the entire world (you could switch to imports by selecting the Imports CIF tab beside the Export sFOB tab). Hitting the Calendar dropdown allows you to change the date range and frequency. Hitting the Country dropdown lets you select a specific region or country. In the example below, I’ve changed the calendar from months to years, and the country to Ukraine. By doing so, the table now depicts the total US dollar value of exports and imports between Ukraine and all other countries. The Export button at the top allows you to save the report in a number of formats, Excel being the most data friendly option.
IMF DOTS Basic Report – Total Value of Exports from Ukraine, Last Five Years
While this is the quickest option, it comes with some downsides; the biggest one is that there are no unique identifiers for the countries, which is important if you wanted to join this table to a GIS vector file for mapping, or another country-level table in a database.
A better approach is to return to the home page and use the Query tab, which allows you to get a unique identifier and filter out countries and regions that are not of interest.
DOTS Query Tab
Under Columns, select the time frame and interval. For example, check Years for Frequency at the top, and change the dropdowns at the bottom from Months to Years. From -5 to 0 would give you the last five years in ascending order.
Rows allows you to filter out countries or regions that you don’t want to see in the results. You can also change the attribute that is displayed. Once the menu is open, right click in an empty area and choose Attribute. Here you can choose a variant country name, or an ISO country code. ISO codes are commonly used for uniquely identifying countries.
Indicator lets you choose Exports (FOB), Imports (CIF or FOB), or Trade Balance, all in US dollars.
Counterpart country is the country or region that you want to show trade for, such as Ukraine in our previous example.
The tabs along the top allow you to produce graphs instead of a table (View – Table), to pivot the table (Adjust), and calculate summaries like sums or averages (Advanced).
Export to produce an Excel file. By choosing the ISO codes you’ll lose the country names, but you can join the result to another country data table or shapefile and grab the names from there.
Modify Time
Modify Rows – Country – Change Attribute
DOTS Modified Table to Export: Total Value of Exports from Ukraine Last Five Years
UN COMTRADE
If you want data on the exchange of specific goods and services, quantities in addition to dollar values, and exchanges beyond simple imports and exports, then the UN’s COMTRADE database will be your source. You need to register to download data, but you can generate previews without having to log in. There is an extensive wiki that describes how to use the different database tools, and summaries of technical terms that you need to know for extracting and interpreting the data. You’ll need some understanding of the different systems for classifying commodities and goods. Your options (the links that follow lead to documentation and code lists) are: the Harmonized Classification System (HC), the Standard Industrial Trade Classification (SITC), and the Broad Economic Categories (BEC). What’s the difference? Here are some summaries, quoted directly from a UN report on the BEC:
The HS classification is maintained by the World Customs Organization. Its main purpose is to classify goods crossing the border for import tariffs or for application of some non-tariff measures for safety or health reasons. The HS classification is revised on a five-year cycle (p. 18)
The original SITC was designed in the 1950s as a tool for collection and dissemination of international merchandise trade statistics that would help in establishing internationally comparable trade statistics. By its introduction in 1988, the HS took over as collection and dissemination tool, and SITC was thereon used mostly as an analytical tool. (p. 19)
The Classification by Broad Economic Categories (BEC) is an international product classification. Its main purpose is to provide a set of broad product categories for the analysis of trade statistics. Since its adoption in 1971, statistical offices around the world have used BEC to report trade statistics in a concise and meaningful way (p. iii). The broad economic categories of BEC include all subheadings of the HS classification. Therefore, the total trade in terms of HS equals the total trade of the goods side of BEC. (p. 18)
In short, go with the BEC if you’re interested in high-level groupings, or the HS if you need detailed subdivisions. The SITC would be useful if you need to go further back in time, or if it facilitates looking at certain subdivisions or groupings that the other systems don’t capture.
From COMTRADE’s homepage, I suggest leaving the defaults in place and doing a basic, preliminary search for all global exports for the most recent year, so you can see basic output on the next screen. Then you can apply filters for a narrower search.
For example, let’s look at annual exports of wheat from Ukraine to other countries. Under the HS filter, remove the TOTAL code. Start typing wheat, and you’ll see various product categories: 6-digit codes are the most specific, while 4-digit codes are broader groups that encapsulate the 6-digit categories. We’ll choose wheat and meslin 1001. We’ll select Ukraine as the Reporter (the country that supplied the statistics and represents the origin point), and for the 1st partner we’ll choose All to get a list of all countries that Ukraine exported wheat to. The 2nd partner country we’ll leave as World (alternatively, you would add specific countries here if you wanted to know if there were intermediary nations between the origin and destination).
UN COMTARDE Refine Search with Filters
Hit Preview to see the results. You can click on a heading to sort by dollar value, weight, or country name. Like IMF DOTS, UN COMTRADE measures dollar amounts of exports as FOB and imports as CIF. At this point, you would need to log in to download the data as a CSV (creating an account is free). You would also need to be logged in if you generated an extract that has more than 500 records, otherwise the results will be truncated. You could always copy and paste data for shorter extracts directly from the screen to a spreadsheet, but you wouldn’t get any of the extra metadata fields that come with download, like ISO Country Codes and the classification codes for goods and merchandise.
COMTRADE Filtered Results – Exports of Wheat and Meslin from Ukraine 2021Data Exported from COMTRADE to CSV with Identifiers
Mapping
For data from either source, if you wanted to map it you’d need to have a data table where there is one row for each country with columns of attributes, and with one column that has the ISO country code to serve as a unique identifier. Save the data table in an Excel file or as a table in a database. Download a country shapefile from Natural Earth. Add the shapefile and data table to a project and join them using the ISO code. Natural Earth shapefiles have several different ISO code columns that represent nations, sovereigns, and parent – child relationships; be sure you select the right one. Data table records that represent regions or groupings of countries (i.e. the EU, ASEAN, sum of smaller countries per continent not enumerated, etc.) will fall out of the dataset, as they won’t have a matching feature in the country shapefile. The map at the top of this post was created in QGIS, using COMTRADE and Natural Earth.
This semester we launched a project to inventory our USGS topographic map collection. Our holdings include tens of thousands (probably over a 100,000) of these maps that depict the nation’s physical terrain and built environment in great detail. One of my former students wrote a Python program using the tkinter module to create a GUI, which we’re using to filter a list of published maps in a SQLite database to match ones that we have in hand. Here’s a short guide that documents our process.
The list we’re using as our base table is what powers USGS topoView, which allows you to browse and download over 200,000 historic topos (1880 to 2006) that have been digitized and georferenced. The application also includes maps produced from 2009 forward that are part of the newer US Topo project; these maps are created on an on-going basis by pulling together a number of existing government data sources (unlike the historic maps, which were created by manual field surveys and updated over time using aerial photographs and satellite imagery).
You can search topoView using the name of a location or quadrangle (the grid cell that represents the area of each map, named after the most prominent feature in that area) to find all available maps for that location. There’s a set of filters that allows you to focus on the Historic Topographic Map Collection (HTMC) versus the US Topo Collection (2009 to present), or a specific scale. Choose a scale and zoom in, and you’ll see the grid cells for that series so you can identify map coverage. The 24k scale is the most familiar series; as the largest scale / smallest area maps that the USGS produced, it provides the most detail and covers every state and US territory. Each map covers an area of 7.5 x 7.5 minutes (think of a degree as 60 mins) and an inch on these maps represents 2,000 feet. This scale was introduced in the late 1940s, and replaced both the 63k scale map (a 15 x 15 minute map where 1 inch = 1 mile) that was the previous standard, and the less common 48k scale.
There are also smaller scale maps, which cover larger areas. The 100k series was introduced in the mid 1970s and covers the lower 48 states and Hawaii. Each map covers an area of 30 x 60 minutes and uses metric units (1 inch = 1.6 miles). The 250k series was introduced in the 1940s by the US Army Map Service and was eventually taken over by the USGS. These maps include all 50 states, cover an area of 1 x 2 degrees, and use imperial units (1 inch = 4 miles). There are about 1,800 quads for the 100k series and only 900 or so for the 250k, versus over 60,000 for the 24k series.
Once you search for an area or click on a quad, you’ll see all the maps available in that area over time. Applying the scale filter shows you just maps at that scale, plus some similar but odd scale maps that are not numerous enough to get their own filter. The predominate year listed for each record is the “map year”, which is when field work was done to either create the map or substantively update it. There’s also an edition or “print year” that indicates when the map was printed. If you look at the metadata (use the info button) or preview the map, there may be an edit or photo revision year, indicating if the map was updated back at headquarters using air photos or imagery. The image below illustrates where you can find this information on a standard 24k scale map.
1: Map Scale 2: Quad Name 3: Map Year and Revision Year 4: Print Year
Clicking on the thumbnail of the map in the results gives you a quick full screen preview. There are several download options, including a JPEG if you want a small compressed image, or a GeoTiff if you want a lossless format with the best resolution, and if you want to use it in GIS software as a raster layer.
The changes you can see over time on these maps can be striking, illustrating the suburban sprawl of the 20th century. Consider the snippets from a 24k map of the Orlando West, Florida quadrangle below.
Orlando West 1956
Orlando West 1980
While many people are familiar with the topographic series, the USGS also publishes a number of other map and report series that cover topics like hydrography, oil and gas exploration, mining, land use and land cover, and special scientific investigations. They have digitized (but not georeferenced) many of these maps, from the 1950s to present. You can browse through a list of all these publications, or you can search across them in the Publications Warehouse. If you search, try the Advanced Search and specify publication type and subtype as filters. Most of the maps are classified as publication type: Report, and subtype: USGS Numbered Series.
For example, the IMAP series includes special investigation maps that cover tectonic, geologic, mineral, topographic, and bathymetric maps of specific small or regional areas in the US. They also include maps of Antarctica, special investigations in other countries, the moon, and other planets and moons. Every report / map has a landing page with a permanent URL and doi that uses the series number of the map, with links to a PDF of the map as well as a Dublin Core metadata record. For example, here’s a Geologic Map of Io from 1992, part of the IMAP series.
Portion of a Geologic Map of the Jovian Moon Io
This is great, as you can use these records and metadata for building other interactive finding aids, and can link directly to individual maps. The USGS has created different portals for accessing subsets of these materials, such as this special topics page for identifying different planetary maps in the SIM and IMAP series.
Some other gems I’ve discovered stashed away in the publications warehouse: a poster of map projections (with a flip side portrait of Gerardus Merctor) which should be familiar to most 1990s university geography students; it was often hung in classrooms and provided as an insert in cartography textbooks. Also, a digitized copy of the book Maps for America. Originally published for the USGS centenary in 1979, this book provides a comprehensive history and overview of the topographic map series. The scanned copy is the 3rd edition, printed in 1987. If you suddenly find yourself in the position of having to curate a hundred thousand 20th century topo maps, there is no better guide than this book.
In this post I’ll demonstrate how to use the IPUMS CPS Online Data Analysis System to generate summary data from the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). The tool employs the Survey Documentation and Analysis system (SDA) created at UC Berkeley.
The CPS is a monthly stratified sample survey of 60k households. It includes a wide array of statistics, some captured routinely each month, others at various intervals (such as voter registration and participation, captured every November in even-numbered years). The same households are interviewed over a four-month period, then rotated out for four months, then rotated back in for a final four months. Given its consistency, breadth, high response rate and accuracy (interviews are conducted in-person and over the phone), researchers use the CPS microdata (individual responses to surveys that have been de-identified) to study demographic and socio-economic trends among and between different population groups. It captures many of the same variables as the American Community Survey, but includes a fair number that are not.
I think the CPS is used less often by geographers, as the sample size is too small to produce reliable estimates below the state or metropolitan area levels. I find that students and researchers who are only familiar with working with summary data often don’t use it; generating your own estimates from microdata records can be time consuming.
The IPUMS project provides an online analyzer that lets you generate summary estimates from the CPS without having to handle the individual sample records. I’ve used it in undergraduate courses where students want to generate extracts of data at the regional or state level, and who are interested in variables not collected in the ACS, such as generational households for immigrants. The online analyzer doesn’t include the full CPS, but only the data that’s collected in March as part of the core CPS series, and the Annual Social & Economic Supplement (ASEC). It includes data from 1962 to the present.
To access any of the IPUMS tools, you must register and create an account, but it’s free and non-commercial. They provide an ample amount of documentation; I’ll give you the highlights for generating a basic geographic-based extract in this post.
Creating a Basic Geographic Summary Table
Once you launch the tool, the first thing you need to do is select some variables. You can use the drill-down folder menus at the bottom left, but I find it’s easier to hit the Codebook button and peruse the alphabetical list. Let’s say we want to generate state-level estimates for nativity for a recent year. If we go into the codebook and look-up nativity, we see it captures foreign birthplace or parentage. Also in the list is a variable called statefip, which are the two-digit codes that uniquely identify every state.
Codebook for Nativity – Foreign Birthplace or Parentage
Back on the main page for the Analyzer in the tables tab, we provide the following inputs:
Row represents our records or observations. We want a record for every state, so we enter the variable: statefip.
Column represents our attributes or variables. In this example, it’s: nativity.
Selection filter is used to specify that we want to generate estimates from a subset of all the responses. To generate estimates for the most recent year, we enter year as the variable and specify the filter value in parentheses: year(2020). If we didn’t specify a year, the program would use all the responses back to 1962 to generate the estimates.
Weight is the value that’s used to weight the samples to generate the estimates. The supplemental person weight sdawt is what we’ll use, as nativity is measured for individual persons. There is a separate weight for household-level variables.
Under the output option dropdown, we change the Percentaging option from column to row. Row calculates the percentage of the population in each nativity category within the state (row). The column option would provide the percentage of the population in each nativity category between the states. In this example, the row option makes more sense.
For the confidence interval, check the box to display it, as this will help us gauge the precision of the estimate. The default level is 95%; I often change this to 90% as that’s what the American Community Survey uses.
At the bottom of the screen, run the table to see the result.
CPS Online Analyzer – Generate Basic Extract for Nativity by State for a Single Year
In the result, the summary of your parameters appears at the top, with the table underneath. At the top of the table, the Cells contain legend lists what appears in each of the cells in order. In this example, the row percent is first, in bold. For the first cell in Alabama: 91.0% of the total population have parents who were both born in the US, the confidence interval is 90.2% to 91.8% (and we’re 90% confident that the true value falls within this range), and the large number at the bottom is the estimated number of cases that fall in this category. Since we filtered our observations for one year, this represents the total population in that category for that year (if we check the totals in the last column against published census data, they are roughly equivalent to the total population of each state).
Output Table – Nativity by State in 2020
Glancing through the table, we see that Alabama and Alaska have more cases where both parents are born in the US (91.0% and 85.1%) relative to Arizona (68.7%). Arizona has a higher percentage of cases where both parents are foreign born, or the persons themselves are foreign-born. The color coding indicates the Z value (see bottom of the table for legend), which indicates how far a variable deviates from the mean, with dark red being higher than the expected mean and dark blue being lower than expected. Not surprisingly, states with fewer immigrants have higher than average values for both parents native born (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas) while this value is lower than average for more diverse states (Arizona, California).
To capture the table, you could highlight / copy and paste the screen from the website into a spreadsheet. Or, if you return to the previous tab, at the bottom of the screen before running the table, you can choose the option to export to CSV.
Variations for Creating Detailed Crosstabs
To generate a table to show nativity for all races:
Input Parameters – Generate Tables for Nativity by State for each Race
In the control box, type the variable race. The control box will generate separate tables in the results for each category in the control variable. In this case, one nativity table per racial group.
To generate a table for nativity specifically Asians:
Input Parameters – Generate Table for Nativity by State for Asians
Remove race from the control box, and add it in the filter box after the year. In parentheses, enter the race code for Asians; you can find this in the codebook for race: year(2020), race(651).
Now that we’re drilling down to smaller populations, the reliability of the estimates is declining. For example, in Arkansas the estimate for Asians for both parents foreign born is 32.4%, but the value could be as low as 22.2% or as high as 44.5%. The confidence interval for California is much narrower, as the Asian population is much larger there. How can we get a better estimate?
Output Table – Nativity by State for Asians in 2020
Generate a table for nativity for Asians over a five year period:
Input Parameters – Generate Table for Nativity by State for Asians for 5-year Period
Add more years in the year filter, separated by commas. In this version, our confidence intervals are much narrower; notice for Asians for both parents foreign born in Arkansas is now 19.2% with a range of 14.1% to 25.6%. By increasing the sample pool with more years of data, we’ve increased the precision of the estimate at the cost of accepting a broader time period. One big caveat here: the Weighted N represents the total number of estimated cases, but since we are looking at five years of data instead of one it no longer represents a total population value for a single year. If we wanted to get an average annual estimate for this 5-year time period (similar to what the ACS produces), we’d have to divide each of estimates by five for a rough approximation. You can download the table and do these calculations in a spreadsheet or stats program.
Output Table – Nativity by State for Asians between 2016-2020 (weighted N = estimate of total cases over 5 years, not an average annual value)
You can also add control variables to a crosstab. For example, if you added sex as a control variable, you would generate separate female and male tables for the nativity by state for the Asian population over a given time period,
Example of a Profile Table
If we wanted to generate a profile for a given place as opposed to a comparison table, we can swap the variables we have in the rows and columns. For example, to see nativity for all Hispanic subgroups within California for a single year:
Input Parameters – Generate a Profile Table for California of Nativity by Hispanic Groups in 2020
In this case, you could opt to calculate percentages by column instead of row, if you wanted to see percent totals across groups for the categories. You could show both in the same chart, but I find it’s difficult to read. In this last example, note the large confidence intervals and thus lower precision for smaller Hispanic groups in California (Cuban, Dominican) versus larger groups (Mexican, Salvadoran).
Output Table – Nativity by Hispanic Groups in California 2020 (confidence interval is much larger for smaller groups)
In short – this is handy tool if you want to generate some quick estimates and crosstabs from the CPS without having to download and weight microdata records yourself. You can create geographic data for regions, divisions, states, and metro areas. Just be mindful of confidence intervals as you drill down to smaller subgroups; you can aggregate by year, geography, or category / group to get better precision. What I’ve demonstrated is the tip of the iceberg; read the documentation and experiment with creating charts, statistical summaries, and more.
In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to access and download multiple decades of annual population data for US states, counties, and metropolitan areas in a single table. Last semester, I was helping a student in a GIS course find data on tuberculosis cases by state and metro area that stretched back several decades. In order to make meaningful comparisons, we needed to calculate rates, which meant finding an annual time series for total population. Using data directly from the Census Bureau is tough going, as they don’t focus on time series and you’d have to stitch together several decades of population estimates. Metropolitan areas add more complexity, as they are modified at least a few times each decade.
In searching for alternatives, I landed at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). As part of their charge is studying the economy over time, they gather data from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and others to build time series, and they update them as geography and industrial classification schemes change. They publish national, state, metropolitan area, and county-level GDP, employment, income, wage, and population tables that span multiple decades. Their economic profile table for metros and counties covers 1969 to present, while the state profile table goes back to 1958. Metropolitan areas are aggregates of counties. As metro boundaries change, the BEA normalizes the data, adjusting the series by taking older county-level data and molding it to fit the most recent metro definitions.
Finding the population data was a bit tricky, as it is embedded as one variable in the Economic Profile table (identified as CAINC30) that includes multiple indicators. Here’s the path to get it:
From the BEA website, choose Tools – Interactive Data.
From the options on the next page, choose Regional from the National, Industry, International or Regional data options. There’s also a link to a video that illustrates how to use the BEA interactive data tool.
From the Regional Data page, click “Begin using the data” (but note you can alternatively “Begin mapping the data” to make some basic web maps too, like the one in the header of this post).
On the next page are categories, and under each category are data tables for specific series. In this case, Personal Income and Employment by County and Metropolitan Area was what I wanted, and under that the Economic Profile CAINC30 table (states appear under a different heading, but there’s a comparable Economic Profile table for them, SAINC30).
On the multi-screen table builder, you choose a type of geography (county or different metro area options), and on the next tab you can choose individual places, hold down CTRL and select several, or grab them all with the option at the top of the dropdown. Likewise for the Statistic, choose Population (persons), or grab a selection, or take all the stats. Under the Unit of Measure dropdown, Levels gives you the actual statistic, but you can also choose percent change, index values, and more. On the next tab, choose your years.
On the final page, if your selection is small enough you can preview the result and then download. In this case it’s too large, so you’re prompted to grab an Excel or CSV file to download.
And there you have it! One table with 50+ years of annual population data, using current metro boundaries. The footnotes at the bottom of the file indicate that the latest years of population data are based on the most recent vintage estimates from the Census Bureau’s population estimates. Once the final intercensal estimates for the 2010s are released, the data for that decade will be replaced a final time, and the estimates from the 2020s will be updated annually as each new vintage is released until we pass the 2030 census. Their documentation is pretty thorough.
BEA 5-decade Time Series of Population Data by Metro Area
The Interactive Data table approach allows you to assemble your series step by step. If you wanted to skip all the clicking you can grab everything in one download (all years for all places for all stats in a given table). Of course, that means some filtering and cleaning post-download to isolate what you need. There’s also an API, and several other data series and access options to explore. The steps for creating the map that appears at the top of this post were similar to the steps for building the table.
At These Coordinates 
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