How the numbers are made
Inputs. 19,683 Mapflow building footprints with heights over 20.2 km²: the western half of Talgar (11.3 km² inside the town limits) and the settlements west of it. Only class_id 101 (1,361 apartment blocks) and 102 (17,328 houses) carry people; the other 994 buildings are left empty.
Terrain. Copernicus DEM GLO-30 (30 m cells) at true scale. The area climbs from about 800 m in the north to 1,100 m in the south, at the foot of the Trans-Ili Alatau. The DEM is a surface model, so it includes trees and buildings smoothed to 30 m cells; that is small next to the 300 m slope.
Population. Kontur Population 2023 gives residents for 400 m H3 cells. It puts only 33,143 people inside Talgar's town limits, against 63,883 in the 2021 census, so Kontur cells inside the town are scaled by 1.93. Cells outside the town are used as they are. That gives 37,751 residents for the covered area: 28,534 inside the town limits and 9,217 outside.
Kontur cells + volume. Each Kontur cell's residents are split across the residential buildings inside it by volume (footprint × height).
Volume only. The same 37,751 residents split across all residential buildings by volume (2.62 per 1,000 m³), ignoring the Kontur cells. Compared with the Kontur model, it puts about 16% of residents in different places.
Grid. H3 resolution 10 (average edge 75.9 m; cells are ≈1.80 ha here). A building that crosses cell edges is split by footprint share, so cell totals add up to exactly 37,751.
Download the H3 grid (GeoJSON)
Buildings and heights come from Mapflow, which extracts them from satellite and aerial imagery. Learn more at mapflow.ai