Digital Elevation Model Project

The Digital Elevation Model Project (DEMP) is a group of professionals passionate about the need for the world to have access to high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs). DEMs are key to helping the world increase its resilience to climate change and natural disasters, yet DEMs are either too low resolution to be useful or too expensive to obtain high resolution.

This group has come together to: 1) encourage governments to release higher resolution DEMs; and 2) to discuss current projects underway relating to DEMs, such as TandemX.

DEMP was born out of a workshop in March 2014, where the number one issue surrounding open data was accessing high resolution DEMs. From there, DEMP has met via telecom approximately every 6 weeks. Recently, some DEMP members met in person in San Francisco, California in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting.

We are a global consortium of organizations from the private sector, civil society, non-profits and academia. Current members include representatives from: Australia’s Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI), the Broad Institute, Climate Central, Digital Globe, Google, NASA and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Remote Sensing Solutions, SecondMuse, Sigma Space Corporation, UCLA, UK Department for International Development, University of Bristol, US Geological Survey, US State Department, the World Bank and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), and the World Food Programme.