Geospatial explorer — Misiones

Misiones — a subtropical province in north-eastern Argentina bordering Brazil and Paraguay — recorded 1.27 million inhabitants across 17 departments in the 2022 national census, yet its population is distributed in a markedly uneven pattern that reflects both the physical geography of the Paraná River corridor and the historical expansion of agricultural frontiers into what remains of the Atlantic Forest, one of the most biodiverse and fragmented biomes on Earth. This explorer renders every building footprint in the province as a three-dimensional extrusion whose height and colour encode dasymetric population estimates calibrated at the census-radio level, thereby allowing fine-grained inspection of the urban–rural gradient that characterises a territory where the capital city of Posadas — home to roughly 380,000 people — coexists with vast rural hinterlands dominated by yerba mate plantations, commercial forestry, and remnant forest patches.

Key findings Link to heading

The spatial distribution of estimated population across the province’s building stock suggests several territorial patterns that are consistent with the broader literature on Argentine provincial urbanisation:

  • Urban concentration along the Paraná corridor. The departments of Capital (Posadas), Oberá, and Eldorado account for a disproportionate share of both building density and estimated population, forming a linear urban system that follows the Paraná River and the main national routes — a pattern that appears to reflect the historical role of fluvial and road infrastructure in structuring settlement.
  • Low-density rural hinterland. Interior departments such as Guaraní, San Pedro, and General Manuel Belgrano exhibit markedly lower building densities; population estimates indicate that large expanses of territory are occupied by dispersed rural dwellings rather than consolidated urban nuclei.
  • Building density and proximity to national routes. The three-dimensional view reveals that building concentration tends to decline rapidly with distance from Ruta Nacional 12 and Ruta Nacional 14, suggesting that road connectivity remains a primary determinant of settlement location at the provincial scale.
  • Departmental disparities in population density. Switching to the density colour ramp makes visible the contrast between departments where population is packed into compact urban footprints and those where it is spread across extensive rural areas — a distinction that carries implications for the provision of public services and territorial planning.

Data and method Link to heading

The explorer employs a provincial-scale dasymetric approach to disaggregate census-radio population totals to individual building footprints. The source data consist of two layers: population counts from the 2022 Censo Nacional de Población, Hogares y Viviendas published by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC) at the census-radio level — the finest publicly available geographic unit — and building footprints drawn from the Global Building Atlas (Zhu et al., 2025, Earth System Science Data), which provides height and area attributes for each structure. Within every census radio, total population is allocated to buildings in proportion to estimated volume (footprint area multiplied by height), so that larger and taller structures receive a higher share of the radio’s inhabitants — a proxy that, whilst imperfect, captures the basic relationship between built volume and residential capacity.

The Zones mode aggregates the building-level estimates back to the census-radio geography, rendering each radio as a choropleth polygon. This dual-resolution design permits both micro-scale inspection of individual buildings and meso-scale comparison of census units, facilitating the identification of urban–rural gradients and intra-departmental heterogeneity across Misiones.

How to use the explorer Link to heading

The interactive map supports several modes of exploration. The population/density toggle switches the colour encoding between absolute estimated inhabitants per building and population density per square metre of footprint. Activating Zones mode replaces the building-level view with census-radio polygons; clicking any building or zone displays a panel with detailed attributes — estimated population, households, building area, and the census-radio identifier. The lasso tool enables the selection of an arbitrary area on the map; once drawn, the tool aggregates population and building statistics for the enclosed region. For an uncluttered view, the explorer can be opened in fullscreen mode.

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Data: Global Building Atlas (Zhu et al., 2025, ESSD) · INDEC — Censo Nacional de Población, Hogares y Viviendas 2022.