  The Berry curvature is essential in Born$-$Oppenheimer molecular dynamics,
describing the screening of the nuclei by the electrons in a magnetic field.
Parts of the Berry curvature can be understood as the external magnetic field
multiplied by an effective charge so that the resulting Berry force behaves
like a Lorentz force during the simulations. Here we investigate whether these
effective charges can provide insight into the electronic structure of a given
molecule or, in other words, whether we can perform a population analysis based
on the Berry curvature. To develop our approach, we first rewrite the Berry
curvature in terms of charges that partially capture the effective charges and
their dependence on the nuclear velocities. With these Berry charges and charge
fluctuations, we then construct our population analysis yielding atomic charges
and overlap populations. Calculations at the Hartree$-$Fock level reveal that
the atomic charges are similar to those obtained from atomic polar tensors.
However, since we additionally obtain an estimate for the fluctuations of the
charges and a partitioning of the atomic charges into contributions from all
atoms, we conclude that the Berry population analysis is a useful alternative
tool to analyze the electronic structure of molecules.
