20 replies to this topic

[Hans van der Maarel]

Seeing that it's a subject that often comes up, I thought it was a good idea to start collecting links to (free) GIS data here.

Gis Data Depot
Contains worldwide vector information, US topographic maps and DEM's. Vector data is often supplied in E00 format. Some downloads are only available as 'premium' (i.e. at a fee)

USGS Seamless Data Distribution
Offers seamless data for the United States and (limited) worldwide. Area of interest can be selected.

SRTM at NASA ftp
SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) and SRTM30 downloads. The location of these has been subject to change a few times, be warned.

Tom Patterson's Natural Earth
See this thread for details.

Please add more if you have them.

[ELeFevre]

University of Maryland - Global Land Cover Facility: Satellite Imagery (Landsat MSS, TM, ETM+, Modis, Aster, SRTM, Quickbird - plus other products)

Imagery can be downloaded by FTP or through a Web Interface.

Here's the Link

[Rick Dey]

California State University, Northridge; Geography Dept.
California Geographical Survey
DEMs of California and the West
DLGs of California 1:100,000

[Nick Springer]

ETOPO2 batymetry and hyspography data set for large areas. The data set covers the whole world.

You can get it here for free: http://www.ngdc.noaa...rs/01mgg04.html

[Martin Gamache]

Canada Data

[ELeFevre]

U.S. National Park Service Data Clearing House:
Here's the link


U.S. Natural Resoures GIS Program: addtional FTP resource for National Park data
Here's the link

[Claude]

more Canada:
http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/clf/en

[Hans van der Maarel]

I've pinned this topic, so it'll stay at the top of the list. I think it'll turn out to be a very useful list. Thanks for your input, everybody.

[Claude]

today i've been digging up data for the USA on www.nationalatlas.gov. all sorts of stuff in the following categories:
Agriculture
Environment
People
Biology
Geology
Transportation
Boundaries
History
Water
Climate
Reference
you can get the layers in shape files or sdts


www.nationalatlas.gov

[CommEn Space]

The Geospatial One Stop (geodata.gov) has released version 2 of it's service:
http://gos2.geodata.gov/wps/portal/gos

The site pulls from federal, state, local, tribal, and private data sources in the US. By acting as a portal to other online data servers, you can use their map browser to view data or add data directly into your IMS/WMS capable desktop GIS (ArcMap).

[Rob]

http://www.doylesdartden.com/gis/

found this site the other day. has a page for each USA state with links to local data resource pages. Some state have more than others, but a decent place to start none the less.

rob

[Hans van der Maarel]

There's some good data available on geotorrent.org, you'll need a bittorrent client to download it.

[EcoGraphic]

Canada Data (fees apply)

surface features: roads, topo lines,water bodies,etc......

Toporama

[Rob]

US coastal bathymetry.

Woneil provided this link to a post in the map gallery. such a cool site had to post it on this thread too.

http://www.ngdc.noaa...al/coastal.html

[woneil]

This is my list of links to selected (mostly) free (mostly) downloadable cartographic data sources:

NGDC -- the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center is the richest site I know of for geophysical data. Many, many pages under this master one.

NGDC data index -- This is the cheat sheet for the NGDC site.

NGDC "what's new" -- Something new every month or two.

U. S. Coast Survey -- The Coast Survey has some useful products.

U. S. Coast Survey historical collection -- This is somewhat hit-or-miss, but there are a lot of jewels among these scans of old charts. Very useful for historical mapping of some areas.

U. S. Coast Survey Coastal GIS information

U. S. Geological Survey Digital Line Graphs (DLGs)

U. S. Geological Survey index to elevation products

U. S. Geological Survey index to land cover products

U. S. Geological Survey index to map products

U. S. Geological Survey index to aerial photo products

Scripps Global Topo -- Enhanced and extended version of SRTM 30" resolution DEM from Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

NGA -- The U.S. DoD's National Geophysical Intelligence Agency was formed by amalgamating all of the old DoD mapping, charting, and geodesy organizations with the intelligence community geo-oriented agencies. The result has not been a happy one in many ways and it is not at all apparent that it has done much to further efficiency or economy, as claimed. Anyway, this is NGA's page on "products and services." The agency has pretty much stopped allowing public access to its new data, but the older stuff remains useful for many purposes.

Natural Earth -- The Natural Earth data set, by Tom Paterson of the U. S. National Parks Service, gives global data at 1.24 km resolution plus U.S. coterminous at 500 m resolution, showing land cover and shaded relief.

Of course there are many more sources of data, but these pages alone provide access to incredible riches. When I think of some of the efforts my staff had to go to in the late 1970s to get far, far more meager data assembled for a project, with the full resources of the U.S. government, I have to laugh. We live in an amazing world.

Will O'Neil