The capital Reykjavik is by far the largest city in Iceland. Over 138,700 people live in the capital. The second largest city, Kópavogur, is located just outside of Reykjavik and has close to 40,000 inhabitants. Also the third largest city, Hafnarfjörður, can be found close to the capital. More than 375,000 people live in Iceland.

This dataset is about cities in Iceland. It has 43 rows. It features 7 columns including country, population, latitude, and longitude.

Nearly two thirds of the population in Iceland lived in cities in 2022. However, the share has decreased somewhat over the past 10 years. Furthermore, the share of people living in rural areas increased from 15.5 percent in 2020 to over 21 percent in 2021. In 2022, 241,000 of Iceland's 376,248 inhabitants lived in the capital region.

This dataset contains administrative polygons grouped by country (admin-0) with the following subdivisions according to Who's On First placetypes:
- macroregion (admin-1 including region)
- region (admin-2 including state, province, department, governorate)
- macrocounty (admin-3 including arrondissement)
- county (admin-4 including prefecture, sub-prefecture, regency, canton, commune)
- localadmin (admin-5 including municipality, local government area, unitary authority, commune, suburb)

The dataset also contains human settlement points and polygons for:
- localities (city, town, and village)
- neighbourhoods (borough, macrohood, neighbourhood, microhood)

The dataset covers activities carried out by Who's On First (WOF) since 2015. Global administrative boundaries and human settlements are aggregated and standardized from hundreds of sources and available with an open CC-BY license. Who's On First data is updated on an as-need basis for individual places with annual sprints focused on improving specific countries or placetypes. Please refer to the README.md file for complete data source metadata. Refer to our blog post for explanation of field names.

Data corrections can be proposed using Write Field, an web app for making quick data edits. You’ll need a Github.com account to login and propose edits, which are then reviewed by the Who's On First community using the Github pull request process. Approved changes are available for download within 24-hours. Please contact WOF admin about bulk edits.

This statistic shows the degree of urbanization in Iceland from 2013 to 2023. Urbanization means the share of urban population in the total population of a country. In 2023, 94.04 percent of Iceland's total population lived in urban areas and cities. The population of Iceland Iceland is currently 94 percent urban, making it the eighth most urban country in the world. However, even though the majority of the population lives in urban areas, the island itself is not densely populated. The population overwhelmingly lives in the nation’s capital and largest city, Reykjavik, which is located in the southwest corner of the island and is considered the northernmost national capital in the world. Reykjavik is only home to around 120,000 people and has more of a suburban feel to it than that of an urban metropolis. Reykjavik has become the home base for the country’s booming tourist industry for those who want to venture out to explore the island’s vast wilderness. In 2014 alone, there were around 4.4 million tourists who stopped on the island for a short stay (413264). The two second largest cities, Kopavogur and Hafnarfjour, are also located very close to the capital, and are each home to around 30,000 people- significantly less than the population of Reykjavik. In total, the small island nation reports a population of around 330,000 people as of 2015, and these figures are not likely to grow significantly in the future, as the fertility rate is less than the natural replacement rate and annual population growth is also low.

Open and free data for assessing the human presence on the planet.

The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) project produces global spatial information, evidence-based analytics, and knowledge describing the human presence on the planet. The GHSL relies on the design and implementation of spatial data processing technologies that allow automatic data analytics and information extraction from large amounts of heterogeneous geospatial data including global, fine-scale satellite image data streams, census data, and crowd sourced or volunteered geographic information sources.

The JRC, together with the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO) and Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DG DEFIS) are working towards a regular and operational monitoring of global built-up and population based on the processing of Sentinel Earth Observation data produced by European Copernicus space program. In addition, the EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) undertakes activities related to user uptake of data, information and services.

Using whole genome shotgun sequences from 92 white-tailed eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla) sampled from Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, and Turkey between 1885–1950 and after 1990, we investigate the genomic variation within countries over time, and between countries. Clear signatures of ancient biogeographic substructure across Europe and the North‐East Atlantic are observed. The greatest genomic differentiation was observed between island (Greenland and Iceland) and mainland (Denmark, Norway and Estonia) populations. The two island populations share a common ancestry from a single mainland population, distinct from the other sampled mainland populations, and despite the potential for high connectivity between Iceland and Greenland they are well separated from each other and are characterized by inbreeding and little variation. Temporal differences also highlight a pattern of regional populations persisting despite the potential for admixture. All sampled populations generally showed a decline in effective population size over time, which may have been shaped by four historical events: I) isolation of refugia during the last glacial period 110‐115,000 years ago, II) population divergence following the colonization of the deglaciated areas ~10,000 years ago, III) human population expansion, which led to the settlement in Iceland ~1,100 years ago, and IV) human persecution and exposure to toxic pollutants during the last two centuries. Methods Tissue was obtained from 92 specimens: 63 contemporary and 29 historic, from six different countries. These included 12 contemporary and eight historic individuals from Greenland, 25 contemporary and two historic individuals from Iceland, 12 contemporary and 13 historic individuals from Norway, 11 contemporary and five historic individuals from Denmark, three contemporary individuals from Estonia, and one historic individual from Turkey (Figure 1). The historic specimens were sampled between 1885 and 1950 (all but the two Icelandic individuals were sampled prior to 1937), while all contemporary individuals were sampled post-1990 (full individual information is presented in Table 1). Muscle tissue and whole blood from contemporary samples from Estonia, Denmark, and Greenland (Table 1) were stored at -20 °C until DNA extraction and were provided by the Department of Ecoscience, Arctic Research Centre, AU, Roskilde, Denmark (Estonian, Danish, and Greenland samples), Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark (Danish samples) and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Nuuk, Greenland (Greenland samples). Whole blood samples from contemporary samples from Iceland were collected in an ongoing monitoring project of the white-tailed eagle in Iceland (led by the Icelandic Institute of Natural History) and stored in EDTA at -20 °C until DNA extraction. Whole genome shotgun DNA sequences from twelve Norwegian individuals were provided by the Department of Natural History, University Museum, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. DNA extraction, library building, and sequencing of all contemporary samples are described in Hansen et al (2021, in review). Historic samples consisting of toepad clippings, taken with disposable sterile scalpel blades, from museum samples provided by The Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Icelandic Institute of Natural History, Reykjavik, Iceland, and Department of Natural History, NTNU University Museum, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. Historic samples from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Turkey, and five of the thirteen Norwegian specimens were processed at the clean laboratory facilities at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Firstly, to prevent cross-contamination from other museum specimens, the samples were cleaned with a dilute bleach solution (ca. 5% commercial strength), then rinsed with 70% ethanol followed by molecular biology grade water performed using a proteinase-based lysis-buffer according to Gilbert et al. (2008). Each sample was added 300 µL lysing buffer including 20 µL proteinase K and incubated for 3 hours. The supernatant was purified by combining 720 µL binding buffer modified as in Allentoft et al. (2015), with 80 µL sample lysate, vortexed and centrifuged through a Monarch® DNA Cleanup Column (New England Biolabs Inc., Beverly, Massachusetts, USA). The binding step was repeated 3 times after which the column was washed with 800 µL PE buffer, from where the DNA eluded into 21.5 µL EBT buffer. Throughout the entire process, only LoBind Eppendorf tubes were used. The remaining eight Norwegian historic specimens were processed at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) University Museum’s dedicated palaeo-genomics laboratory. For these, the genomic DNA extractions were performed with a Qiagen DNeasy Blood & Tissue kit. The manufacturer’s protocol was used except that the amount of proteinase K was doubled, and the lysis step incubation at 56°C was extended to 15 hours. The DNA solutions were incubated at 37°C for 10 minutes prior to elution. For all historic samples, blunt-end Illumina shotgun sequencing libraries were prepared using the BEST protocol (Carøe et al. 2018). In both of the aDNA laboratories, extraction and library blanks were also included to monitor for contamination. Indexed libraries from historic samples from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Turkey and five Norwegian specimens processed at the University of Copenhagen were paired-end sequenced on four flow cells with 2x150 bp read length at deCODE Genetics in Iceland using an Illumina NovaSeq 6000. The purified and indexed libraries for the eight Norwegian specimens processed at NTNU were pooled and paired-end sequenced over two runs on the Illumina HiSeq 4000 platform at the NTNU Genomics Core Facility, and over one run on an Illumina NovaSeq 6000 at the University of Oslo Norwegian National Sequencing Centre. Fastq file quality of all samples was checked using FastQC (Babraham Bioinformatics 2010), then run through AdapterRemoval v2 using standard-setting, but providing adapter sequences for samples, and using the arguments --collapse and –trimns (Schubert et al. 2016). The fastq files were mapped to the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) genome (GCA_900496995.3) using bwa aln, samse, and sampe, with the flags -q 15 and -k 1 (Li and Durbin 2009). Although a white-tailed eagle genome is available, the golden eagle was deliberately chosen as the reference to minimize the potential of mapping biases derived from the fact that the available white-tailed eagle genome is not equally related to all populations studied here (the published white-tailed eagle genomes come from Greenland, UK, and Germany), thus might introduce errors in the analyses (Gopalakrishnan et al. 2017). A further benefit of aligning to the golden eagle genome is that it has been assembled to chromosome level completeness and annotated, thus enabling us to both identify and exclude sex chromosomes as needed in some of the downstream analyses, and identify the genes present in regions under selection. Picard (Broad Institute 2020) was used to remove duplicate reads. To identify likely damaged bases the base quality score was rescaled with mapDamage 2.0 (Jónsson et al. 2013). Genotypes were called using GraphTyper2 (Eggertsson et al. 2019) with standard settings. The VCF file for the 92 individuals was filtered using VCFtools, BCFtools, and VCF-annotate; SNPs had to have a minor allele count of one.

A major task in human genetics is to understand the nature of the evolutionary processes that have shaped the gene pools of contemporary populations. Ancient DNA studies have great potential to shed light on the evolution of populations because they provide the opportunity to sample from the same population at different points in time. Here, we show that a sample of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region sequences from 68 early medieval Icelandic skeletal remains is more closely related to sequences from contemporary inhabitants of Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia than to those from the modern Icelandic population. Due to a faster rate of genetic drift in the Icelandic mtDNA pool during the last 1,100 years, the sequences carried by the first settlers were better preserved in their ancestral gene pools than among their descendants in Iceland. These results demonstrate the inferential power gained in ancient DNA studies through the application of population genetics analyses to relatively large samples.

This horizontal bar chart displays rural population (people) by capital city using the aggregation sum in Iceland. The data is filtered where the date is 2021. The data is about countries per year.

The Icelandic population has been sampled in many disease association studies, providing a strong motivation to understand the structure of this population and its ramifications for disease gene mapping. Previous work using 40 microsatellites showed that the Icelandic population is relatively homogeneous, but exhibits subtle population structure that can bias disease association statistics. Here, we show that regional geographic ancestries of individuals from Iceland can be distinguished using 292,289 autosomal single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We further show that subpopulation differences are due to genetic drift since the settlement of Iceland 1100 years ago, and not to varying contributions from different ancestral populations. A consequence of the recent origin of Icelandic population structure is that allele frequency differences follow a null distribution devoid of outliers, so that the risk of false positive associations due to stratification is minimal. Our results highlight an important distinction between population differences attributable to recent drift and those arising from more ancient divergence, which has implications both for association studies and for efforts to detect natural selection using population differentiation.

Iceland IS: Urban Land Area data was reported at 1,023.837 sq km in 2010. This stayed constant from the previous number of 1,023.837 sq km for 2000. Iceland IS: Urban Land Area data is updated yearly, averaging 1,023.837 sq km from Dec 1990 (Median) to 2010, with 3 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 1,023.837 sq km in 2010 and a record low of 1,023.837 sq km in 2010. Iceland IS: Urban Land Area data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Iceland – Table IS.World Bank: Land Use, Protected Areas and National Wealth. Urban land area in square kilometers, based on a combination of population counts (persons), settlement points, and the presence of Nighttime Lights. Areas are defined as urban where contiguous lighted cells from the Nighttime Lights or approximated urban extents based on buffered settlement points for which the total population is greater than 5,000 persons.; ; Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)/Columbia University. 2013. Urban-Rural Population and Land Area Estimates Version 2. Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/lecz-urban-rural-population-land-area-estimates-v2.; Sum;

This horizontal bar chart displays fertility rate (births per woman) by capital city using the aggregation average, weighted by population female in Iceland. The data is filtered where the date is 2021. The data is about countries per year.

IntroductionThe Faroe Islands are a small archipelago located in the North Atlantic likely colonized by a small group of founders sometime between 50 and 300 CE. Post colonization, the Faroese people have been largely isolated from admixture with mainland and other island populations in the region. As such, the initial founder effect and subsequent genetic drift are likely major contributors to the modern genetic diversity found among the Faroese.MethodsIn this study, we assess the utility of Y-chromosomal microsatellites to detect founder effect in the Faroe Islands through the construction of haplotype networks and a novel empirical method, mutational distance from modal haplotype histograms (MDM), for the visualization and evaluation of population bottlenecks.ResultsWe compared samples from the Faroe Islands and Iceland to possible regional source populations and documented a loss of diversity associated with founder events. Additionally, within-haplogroup diversity statistics reveal lower haplotype diversity and richness within both the Faroe Islands and Iceland, consistent with a small founder population colonizing both regions. However, in the within haplogroup networks, the Faroe Islands are found within the larger set of potential source populations while Iceland is consistently found on isolated branches. Moreover, comparisons of within-haplogroup MDM histograms document a clear founder signal in the Faroes and Iceland, but the strength of this signal is haplogroup-dependent which may be indicative of more recent admixture or other demographic processes.DiscussionThe results of the current study and lack of conformity between Icelandic and Faroese haplotypes implies that the two populations were founded by different paternal gene pools and there is no detectable post-founder admixture between the two groups.