This page contains a categorised list of links to over 500 sites providing freely available geographic datasets - all ready for loading into a Geographic Information System.

We have links to everything from arctic permafrost maps to gridded population data - simply scroll through the list, or use the dropdown menus above to jump to a specific section of interest. See the FAQ for more information on the what, who, how and why of the list.

Beware: The data linked to below may be inaccurate, incomplete, or just plain wrong. As always, critically examine the data you are using, look at what organisation produced it and what agenda they may have, and beware that there are disputes over some of the data (particularly country boundaries).

This list was last updated on 21 May 2020.

Physical Geography

General

Natural Earth - Vector: Includes coastline, land, oceans, islands, rivers, lakes, glaciated areas and bathymetry. Available at multiple levels of detail. A version of this data is also available in the Wagner VII projection, which has good equal area properties, here.

Natural Earth - Raster: Includes various raster images, intended for use as backgrounds for other data, for example hypsometric tints, satellite derived land cover, shaded relief etc.

Global Map: A set of consistent GIS layers covering the whole globe at 1km resolution including: transportation, elevation, drainage, vegetation, administrative boundaries, land cover, land use and population centres. Produced by the International Steering Committee on Global Mapping.

DIVA-GIS Country Data: A collection of data collected from a number of the sources below - includes administrative areas, inland water, roads and railways, elevation, land cover, population and climate. Probably the easiest place to get a simple set of data for a specific country.

UNEP GEOdata: A wide range of data from the United Nations Environment Programme including Global Forest Cover, Global Potential Evapotranspiration, Global Average Monthly Temperatures, Dams, Watershed Boundaries and much more. To get data, choose Advanced Search and select Geospatial Data Sets from the top drop-down link

Koordinates: GIS data aggregation site including data in a number of categories such as elevation, environment, climate etc. Some global datasets, some based on continents, some for specific countries. Mostly vector, but some raster. Registration required

MapCruzin: GIS aggregation site including wide range of data for various areas of the world. Some datasets appears to be of low quality, but others are good.

GeoNetwork: GIS aggregation site including a wide range of data under various categories (both human and physical).

European Environment Agency: Maps and datasets from the European Environment Agency, covering a huge range of physical geography and environmental topics. Europe only.

Land and Ocean Boundaries

GSHHS: A Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database - which basically means it's good quality (no internal inconsistencies, good accuracy).

Elevation

GDEM: 30m resolution global elevation data derived from ASTER satellite images

SRTM (nice download interface): Approx 90m (3 arc-second) resolution elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission for most of the world. Same data as next item, but with a nice download interface.

SRTM: Approx 90m (3 arc-second) resolution elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission for the whole world.

EarthEnv-DEM90: 90m-resolution near-global DEM created by merging the GDEM and SRTM products and post-processing to fill voids and smooth data.

ETOPO1: 1 arc-minute resolution relief model including ocean bathymetry.

Global Multi-Resolution Topography: Gridded elevation at approximately 100m resolution, covering terrestrial and sea-floor topography.

MERIT DEM: Multi-Error-Removed Improved-Terrain DEM, created by removing multiple different types of errors from existing DEMs including SRTM. Available by emailing the developer for a password.

ALOS Global Digital Surface Model: 30m-resolution Digital Surface model from the ALOS satellite

NASADEM: 1-arc-second resolution DEM based on SRTM data

EU-DEM: 25m-resolution DEM covering the whole of Europe, available for download in tiles

OpenTopography: A community-based site giving free access to high-resolution topography data. Data at the moment appears to be clustered on the West Coast of the USA and in Greenland, and is available both as dense point clouds and processed DEMs.

ArcticDEM: Detailed elevation models of all land areas greater than 60 degrees north, generated using photogrammetry from high-res satellite images.

Weather and Climate

Hydrology

Snow/Ice

Randolph Glacier Inventory: A global inventory of glacier outlines, including some multi-temporal data. Major focus on quality control.

NSIDC Frozen Ground maps: Maps of various types of frozen ground (permafrost) in the Arctic and various other areas. Data can be downloaded by clicking on the map name then selecting 'Access Data'

Multisensor Analyzed Sea Ice Extent (MAISE): Sea ice extent for the Northern Hemisphere from the NSIDC

Natural Disasters

Land Cover

(See also Land Use below)

Ecology

Mineral Resources/Oil and Gas

Human Geography

General

Administrative Boundaries

Natural Earth: Includes countries, disputed areas, first-order admin (departments, states etc), populated places, urban polygons, parks and protected areas and water boundaries. Available at multiple levels of detail.

GADM: Global administrative boundaries, with extensive attribute sets. Covers countries and up to four levels of internal administrative boundary (states, departments, counties etc). (For Land Cover see above)

World Borders: World country borders with attributes including country codes (FIPS, ISO etc), area and populations.

Europe in the World: Administrative boundaries for Europe with lots of attribute data for each country/region including information on economy, demography and infrastructure.

CShapes - Historical Boundaries: Historical state boundaries and capitals post-WW2, world-wide, including all changes and dates of changes.

VLIZ Maritime Boundaries: Maritime boundaries and areas of Exclusive Economic Zones, including detailed attribute data on treaties etc. From the Flanders Marine Institute.

TZ timezones: A map of timezone areas in the world as used in the Unix TZ database format, from which we get the naming Europe/London, America/New_York etc. In shapefile format.

Environmental Boundaries

World Spatial Database of Protected Areas: Global vector database of marine and terrestrial protected areas. Rather complicated to download from - instructions at bottom of linked page.

IUCN 2013 Red List: Set of shapefiles produced by the IUCN showing the distribution of endangered species of plants and animals across the world

Protected Planet: Map of protected areas across the whole world, of almost all types. Available for download by clicking the 'Download All' link on the homepage, and then scrolling to the bottom and choosing KMZ, SHP or CSV.

Land Use

(See also Land Cover above)

Lakes, Oceans and other Water Sources

Coastal Water Quality: Quality of coastal waters across the globe measured by chlorophyll concentrations from SeaWIFS satellite. Data for 1998 and 2007.

Global Reservoir and Dam Database: Geographically-referenced data on all reservoirs with a storage capacity of more than 0.1 cubic kilometres. The data consists of polygons outlining reservoirs at high spatial resolution with extensive metadata about the dam and reservoir. Registration required

Wars, Conflict and Crime

ACLED: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data - containing all reported conflict events in 50 countries in the developing world. Data from 1997 to present, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2006 until present.

Uppsala Conflict Data Programme - Georeferenced Event Database: Locations of instances of political violence in Africa and Asia.

Global Terrorism Database: A database of terrorist events (both domestic and international) across the world from 1970-2008, including location and attribute information.

Peace Research Institute Oslo: A range of data including armed conflict locations, replication data, arms trade flows and resource datasets.

Population

Buildings, Roads and Points of Interest

OpenStreetMap: Crowd-sourced data for the whole world consisting of most things you'd find on a standard local paper map: points of interest, buildings, roads and road names, ferry routes etc.

OSM Metro Extracts: City-sized extracts of the OpenStreetMap dataset, updated weekly for cities across the world

POI Factory: Point of Interest files originally designed for use in GPS units, but they can be loaded into a GIS fairly easily. Widely varying quality, and coverage, but includes such things as shop and business locations (eg. all Tesco stores, all McDonald's restaurants) as well as places of worship, speed cameras etc. Registration is required. To download data in a GIS-ready form choose Garmin CSV format on the download page. The CSV file will contain Latitude and Longitude in WGS-84 co-ordinates, as well as descriptions.

SimpleGeo's Places: Point of Interest data from SimpleGeo, provided as a 2Gb Zip file and licensed under the Creative Commons license. Contains over 21 million POIs for over 63 countries.

Nuclear Power Station locations: Locations of all nuclear power stations worldwide (according to the IAEA), provided as a Google Fusion Table. Export to CSV for easy import to a GIS system

Transport and Communications

Open Flights: Airport, airline and route data across the globe. Data is provided as CSV files which can be easily processed to produce GIS outputs. Data includes all known airports, and a large number of routes betwen airports.

World Port Index: Dataset from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency listing approximately 3700 ports across the world, with location and facilities offered.

Global Roads Open Access Data Set: A vector dataset of roads across the world, using a globally consistent data model, and suitable for mapping at the 1:250,000 level. Only roads between settlements are included, not residential streets, and the dataset is accurate to approximately 50m. This dataset is in beta-testing at the moment and will be fully available shortly

JRC Travel Time to Major Cities: Travel time to the nearest major city (> 50,000 people) across the whole world, at approximately 1km resolution

MAP Accessibility to Cities: Similar dataset to the previous one, but updated with far more roads and far better treatment of unpaved roads. Data available for download or on Google Earth Engine.

Undersea Telecommunications Cables: Open source undersea telecommunication cables map, updated frequently. Data can be visualised in the embedded viewer or shapefiles can be downloaded by clicking the Raw Data link on the top right.

Capitaine European Train Stations: Metadata for all train stations in Europe including latitude and longitude.

Gazetteers (place/feature names)

NGIS Country Files: A list of names of regions, areas and populated places for each country in the world, provided by the US Government, with geo-references for each place.

Geonames Country Information: List of all countries in the world with ISO and ISO3 country code (eg. GB for the United Kingdom and FR for France) with capital city, area, population, internet top-level domain, currency, official languages and neighbours.

GRUMP Settlement Points: Locations of individual settlements (as a time series, showing new settlements appearing over time), derived from the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project.

Miscellaneous

G-Econ: Geographically-based economic data, basically providing measurements like GDP but on a raster cell basis (known as Gross Cell Product).

GAR15: UN dataset for Global Assessment of Risk, showing the amount of capital invested in infrastructure at a 5km resolution. Useful for assessment of infrastructure risk and cost of natural disasters.

Internet Map: Data which can be used to produce maps like those shown here showing major linkages in the internet, as well as density of people online.

Individual Country/Area Datasets

Afghanistan

USGS Afghanistan Datasets: Includes satellite images, geology, airborne data and scanned maps.

Afghanistan Election Data: Open Data from elections in Afghanistan including final results.

Humanitarian Response Afghanistan: Wide range of datasets including education, health, water and logistics layers.

Antarctica

Arctic

IPA Circum-arctic Permafrost Map: Vector map of permafrost and ground ice in the arctic region, from the International Permafrost Association.

Arctic Ocean Sea Surface Temperatures: Sea Surface Temperature from 1981-2009 in both raster (.img), vector (.shp), and ASCII (.csv) formats.

Argentina

Argentina National Geographic Institute: A range of GIS data for Argentina

Australia

Austria

Vienna Digital Terrain Model: 5m resolution Digital Terrian Model of Vienna, Austria. Click the green button on the top right to download as a TIFF file.

Vienna City Survey: Very detailed vector mapping of the whole of the City of Vienna - extremely high-level of detail.

Belgium

Belize

Belize Spatial Data Warehouse: A range of data for Belize, including boundaries, ecosystems, protected areas, historic roads, basemaps and settlements.

Bolivia

GeoBolivia: Bolivian Government GIS portal.

Department of Ecosystem Science and Management: A wide range of datasets from the Ecosystem Science and Management government agency in Bolivia.

Brazil

Brazil Geosciences Products: Wide range of datasets for Brazil, including basemaps, administrative boundaries and land use. You may need a bit of Portuguese knowledge to use the site, and some maps are only available in PDF format. Many are available as Shapefiles in the directories whose names end with SHAPE. In Portugeuese

Canada

Central America

Central American Land Cover Classification and Conservation Status: 1km resolution data showing land-cover and conservation status (eg. protected with legal limits, proposed protection) as of 1995. Registration required

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institue: A wide range of data, mostly covering Panama.

Chile

Chile Land Cover data: Officially endorsed land-cover of Chile In Spanish

Chile GIS data: More general Chile data, including roads, railways, urban areas and administrative divisions

More Chile GIS data: A range of Chilean GIS data

China

China Dimensions Data Collection: GIS data including administrative regions, census data linked to maps and agricultural data.

Diamond Bay Data: Chinese counties, census statistics and Digital Chart of the World China GIS layers.

China Historical GIS: Historical boundaries, tribal areas etc for China from 1820 back to 222 BCE. Registration required

Cyprus

DEM for Cyprus from ALOS-2 DSM: A DEM of Cyprus, clipped to the island's boundary and with various error statistics, derived from the ALOS Digital Surface Model

Denmark

Kortforsyningen: A wide range of data for Denmark including aerial photos, LiDAR data, historical maps and more. Registration required

Danmarks Miljoportal: Environmental and ecological data for Denmark

East Timor

Timor-Leste GIS Portal: Wide range of datasets for East Timor, including infrastructure, natural environment, road networks, base maps, elevation and more.

Finland

National Land Survey of Finland: A wide range of data including general topographic maps (1:1,000,000 and 1:4,500,000), administrative divisions, elevations and place names and orthophotos for Finland. (For bulk download, in Finnish, try here

Finnish Meteorological Service: Open meteorological data for Finland

Statistics for Finland: Demographic data available for download

Helsinki data: Geographic data in a wide range of categories - both raster and vector - for Helsinki

HELCOM Baltic sea data: Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission (Helsinki Commission) data on the whole Baltic sea area including biodiversity, environmental monitoring, pollution and more.

France

IGN: Free GIS data for France including relief, drainage, boundaries, raster maps and coastline. In French

ParisData: Open Data for Paris, including lots of georeferenced data. In French

Coastal Orthophotos: Orthophotos over the whole of the French coast available for download. In French

Germany

NIBIS GIS: German GIS aggregation service allowing you to display and download various maps of Germany.

German Postal Areas: Vector polygons of German postal areas (similar to zip code or postcode areas). In German

Greece

Greece Open Geodata: The Greek government's open GeoData portal, with a wide range of datasets.

India

Gateway to Indian Earth Observation: A range of Earth Observation-derived data for India including NDVI, ocean temperature and CartoDEM (a DEM for the whole of India at 30m resolution). Registration required

Iceland

Iceland Institute of Natural History: Geological maps for Iceland

Land Survey of Iceland: General geographic data for Iceland (in Icelandic) Registration required

Ireland

Italy

MondoGIS datasets list: Links to a wide range of Italian GIS datasets including DEMs, administrative boundaries, bathymetry, transport networks and more.

Italian Environment Ministry Geoportal: Various environmental data from the Environment Ministry of Italy

IStat Administrative Boundaries: Administrative boundaries for the whole of Italy, down to the 'comuni' level, available as shapefiles in WGS 1984 or local Italian co-ordinate systems.

Japan

Diamond Bay Data: Japanese place names and rivers.

Kenya

Kenya GIS: Wide range of GIS data (provided as shapefiles) for Kenya including population, land cover, agriculture, poverty and climate.

International Livestock Research Institute: Administrative boundaries, villages, agricultural statistics, economical statistics and much more.

Kenya Open Data: The Kenyan governmental open data site, with a range of data covering the areas of education, poverty, employment agriculture, justice and more.

Mexico

Georeferenced Population: 1990 population for Mexican states, municipalities and islands. Data aligns with US TIGER data at US-Mexican border.

Namibia

Digital Atlas of Namibia: Freely available data for Namibia in categories of Climate, Physical Geography, Living-resources, Land and History and People, Services and Infrastructure.

Namib Sand Sea Digital Database: Set of data covering the Namib Sand Sea (area of sand dunes in Namibia) including DEMs, satellite images, point ages and dune crests.

Nepal

ICIMOD Geoportal: Data from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, focusing on the Himalayas.

The Netherlands

PDOK: Digital topographic maps at various scales available as both vector and raster data.

Overijssel GIS Open Data: Open GIS data for the Dutch region of Overijssel.

New Zealand

LINZ Topographic Maps: Freely available raster copies of Land Information New Zealand topographic maps at 1:50,000 and 1:250,000 scales. Equivalent of Ordnance Survey maps for New Zealand.

LINZ Data Service: A new service by Land Information New Zealand. Topographic, hydrographic, survey, titles and geodetic datasets are freely accessible with more LINZ datasets added over time. Aerial photographs for the whole of New Zealand have recently been added.

Koordinates: GIS data aggregation site which focuses especially on New Zealand. It includes data in a number of categories such as elevation, environment, climate etc. Mostly vector, but some raster. Registration required

LRIS Data Portal: GIS data for New Zealand from Landcare Research, focussing on soil and environmental data and including 25m-resolution DEMs of North and South Island.

New Zealand Bathymetry: 250m-resolution raster bathymetry data for New Zealand's Exclusive Economic Zone.

Department of Conservation Geoportal: A range of conservation-related datasets to download, including conservation areas, marine reserves, campsites, huts and area boundaries.

Norway

Norwegian Mapping Agency Open Data: Open data from the Norwegian Mapping Agency, including topographical maps, road networks, elevation data, place names and more.

Norweigan Land Cover: Various datasets concerning land resources in Norway provided by the Norwegian Landscape and Forest Institute, including land type, forest, tree species and site index with a scale from 1:5000 to 1:250000.

Geological Survey of Norway: Geological data for Norway

Norwegian Petroleum Directorate: Data on licensed extraction areas, wells, fields, pipelines and survey data

Papa New Guinea

Coastline: 1:50,000 coastline of Papa New Guinea, in MapInfo format. Derived from Landsat data.

Peru

GeoCatMin: Wide range of geodata for Peru including administrative boundaries, geomorphology, geology, hydrology, satellite images and more.

Philippines

GIS Data Clearinghouse: Various datasets relating to the Philippines including boundaries, DEMs, rainfall, and river data.

Portugal

Portugese Web Atlas: Many datasets including physical geography data (temperature, wind, geology, seismic data, ecology, soils), human geography data (tourism, population, services), protected areas and detailed data on the Azores and Madeira. Also has a small amount of data on Angola and Mozambique.

Portugese Water Atlas: Huge amount of data on everything related to water in Portugal - basins, river networks, bathymetry and so on.

Puerto Rico

Geology of Puerto Rico: Detailed geological maps in vector format, with extended attribute information. From USGS.

Romania

geo-spatial.org Romania: Good selection of vector and raster layers for Romania, including historical information.

GeoIDEA.RO: GEodata Openness Initiative for Development and Economic Advancement in Romania - a wide range of open geodata for Romania

Russia

Coal Resources of the Soviet Union: Various data about coal in the former Soviet Union, including deposits, basins, ages etc.

Land Resources of Russia: Includes climate, permafrost, soils, transportation, land productivity and much more.

Slovenia

Spain

South Africa

Switzerland

SwissTopo: Data from the Swiss National Mapping Agency including boundaries, 1:1 million vector maps, Landsat images, geological maps and a map of Switzerland during the last glacial maximum.

Swiss Geoportal: The Geoportal of the Swiss Confederation - with some data available directly and others via links to other sites.

United Kingdom (UK)

United Arab Emirates

Abu Dhabi EnviroPortal: Wide range of environmental data for the emirate of Abu Dhabi.

United States of America (USA)

General US National Atlas: All raw data contained in the National Altas is available for downloading including everything from agricultural census data, presidential election results, airports, railways, glaciers, arsenic content in groundwater, and much more. USGS Historical Topographic Maps: Electronic copies of USGS Topographic Maps from the last 125 years. Provided in GeoPDF format, which isn't great for importing into GIS software, but apparently can be converted to GeoTIFF in the latest version of GDAL National Geophysical Data Center: List of all free data from the NGDC - sorted alphabetically not by category, but includes elevation models, land cover, seismology and more. North American Environmental Atlas: Environmental data for the whole of the North American continent, including land cover, pollution, climate, ecosystems, human influence and protected species, in raster and vector formats.



Boundaries and Shorelines US Cartographic Boundaries: Cartographic boundaries, including city boundaries, counties, school districts, voting districts, zip code areas and congressional districts. Mainly from the 2000 census, but some later data.

US Neighbourhood Boundaries: Creative-commons licensed data from Zillow showing the extent of neighbourhoods in urban areas.

NOAA Medium Resolution Digital Vector Shoreline: US coastlines compiled from official NOAA coastal charts covering nearly 75,000 nautical miles of coastline.

Office of Coast Survey Chart Downloader: Free access to NOAA marine navigational charts.

Elevation National Elevation Dataset: Regularly updated DEM for the whole of the US, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Varies from 10m-30m resolution, using best available data for each region.

Great Lakes Bathymetry: Detailed bathymetry data for the Great Lakes at 3 arc-second resolution. To download data click the Create Custom Grids and fill in the areas you want.

Coastal Relief: Various coastal DEMs of the USA at various resolutions. Whole US coastline combining bathymetry and land elevation out to the end of the continental slope is available at 3 arc-second resolution, and various areas available at higher resolution.

Pudget Sound Lidar Consortium: Public-domain high-resolution LiDAR dataset for the Pacific Northwest. Registration Required

Weather and Climate NREL Wind: Wind availablity data across the US from the perspective of wind turbine generation.

Snow Data Assimilation System: Gridded data at 30 arc-seconds, from September 2003 till present, including snow depth, snow water equivalent, solid precipitation, liquid precipitation and more. Contiguous US only.

National Solar Radiation Database: Over thirty years of solar radiation data from sites across the US, Guam and Puerto Rico, plus raster data at around 2km resolution.

Iowa Environmental Mesonet: A range of up-to-date and historic weather data including storm reports, NWS warnings, climate reports and more. Not just for Iowa!

Geology Geological maps of the US states: Detailed geological maps with extended attribute data for each of the US states. To download data select the state, then the area, then click the reference link at the bottom. Scroll down to the bottom and the files are available for download.

Geology of the conterminous US: Similar to the above but in one file for the coterminous US, not including Hawaii and Alaska. Far easier to download than the above.

Magnetic Anomalies: Airborne measurement of magnetic anomalies across the whole of North America, in raster format.

USGS EnergyVision: Maps of various factors relating to energy use in the USA, the most relevant of which is the USA and world-wide geological maps. To download, view the web map, then click on the dropdown box labelled MORE and scroll to the Download GIS data option

PRIO Resource Datasets: Petroleum and diamond resource maps, globally.

Census TIGER: US-wide census data.

TIGER/Line 2010: 2010 extracts from the census database. These files contain the boundaries of census areas, which can then be linked to census data tables.

US Census Grids: Raster griddded datasets for census variables across the US for data from 2000. Approximately 1km resolution.

Archive of Census-related Products: A range of census-related products produced by a research project at CIESIN including boundary, migration and microdata samples.

TOD Database: Economic and demographic information for areas around fixed transit station in the US. Available at three levels - 1/2 mile buffer around station, aggregated transit zones, transit regions. Registration required

History National Historical GIS: Historical GIS data for the USA, including demographics, ancestry, education and more.

Crime and Justice National Archive of Criminal Justice Data: Crime data from the US, including various statistics - all geo-referneced but not necessarily provided in GIS-ready formats.

Power and Energy US National Power Grid: Data from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) showing rough locations of transmission lines and their connectivities. Data from 1993 and has not been updated since.

Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database: A comprehensive data source on the environmental characteristics (air emissions, resource mix, net generation and more) of all electrical power sources in USA. Each record contains location information, allowing use in GIS.

US Energy Information Administration: Individual layers from their interactive mapping system, including coal mines, crude oil pipelines, petrochemical crackers, refineries and more.

Transportation US Street Network Models and Measures: Graph data extracted from OpenStreetMap for road networks in cities and neighbourhoods across the US.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)