San Francisco, London – Based on the NASA data collected by the US Census Bureau over 20 years, a US researcher created a very detailed digital map to track the changing racial diversity in the United States.

The zoomable map, developed by the scientist Tomasz Stepinski, shows at a glance how the racial composition of neighbourhoods in the US changed between 1990 and 2010, researchers said.

The Science Daily website reported Stepinski saying “People do not realize that the US is a diverse country but at the same time is still very segregated.”

Researcher Anna Dmowska who partook in the project also said that the interactive map is publicly available and it can be really beneficial to journalists, policymakers and researchers.

Jeffrey Timberlake, an associate professor of sociology highlighted the importance of the map developed by Stepinski in studying the ethnic change at the neighborhoods level.

Stepinski found it fascinating, and spent hours looking at it.

“When you look at a couple neighborhoods in Los Angeles, you see a big difference between 1990 and 2010 in the shrinking African population and the growth of the Latino population,” he stated.