Free Data

Free Data Sources

US state sites

Country sites

MICRODEM supports many types of data and data formats. Insure the files you download are in an acceptable format. Avoid ESRI e00 format and SPCS data if possible, and never get ERDAS Imagine data.

Some data sets consist of multiple files, and you must pick the correct file to open the data set.

General notes on downloading data.

Other indexes:

Virtual Terrain Project's list of links
Guide to Mostly On-Line and Mostly Free U.S. Geospatial and Attribute Data from Univ. Arkansas
MIT Libraries

Data site

Aeronautical charts
- VFR rasters
- DOF--Digital Obstacle File
Agriculture: http://www.neonscience.org/data/airborne-data
Altimeters, laser: LVIS, ICESAT, and ICESAT-2
Arctic/Antarctic:
Archaeology
- Underwater cultural heritage database
Bathymetry
Beach profiles
Biogeophysical http://toyo.mediasfrance.org/?-Biogeophysical-Products,52-
Biology
- Fish and Wildlife Service GIS: http://www.fws.gov/gis/data/national/
- NOAA West Coast: https://www.westcoast.fisheries.noaa.gov/maps_data/maps_and_gis_data.html
- Northward migrations: http://www.learner.org/jnorth/
- Wildlife tracking: https://www.movebank.org/
- Marine tracking http://www.gtopp.org/
- MoveBank: animal tracking data, https://www.movebank.org/
- MEOP "Marine Mammals Exploring the Oceans Pole to Pole"
- Tree species ranges
BLM PLSS (Public Land Survey System)
Boundaries
Building outlines
CDL--Cropland Data Layer (US)
Cities: Lat, Long, Name, Population
- https://public.opendatasoft.com/explore/dataset/worldcitiespop/export/?disjunctive.country
- https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/6996f03a1b364dbab4008d99380370ed_0
Climate and weather
Coastal topography
- Coastl Relief Models: https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/coastal/crm.html mostly 3 arc second
- Coastal Elevation Models: https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/coastal/coastal.html 1/9 second to 3 second
- https://go.climatecentral.org/coastaldem/ SRTM at 3" improved with other data https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z#Sec15
Coastlines
Contours (see http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5167/)
Corruption: https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018
Country outlines
- Natural Earth has a single shapefile with all countries, with two and three letter country codes
- http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php
- GADM requires download of the entire world (1.2 GB for the zipped shapefile), but then you can use just the level-0 for country outlines (500 MB), although this might have much more detail than needed for small scale maps.
County outlines
Crime
- https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/studies/36399 (this is 2014, but site has other data sets)
Crisis support
- FEMA geoportal: http://fema.maps.arcgis.com/home/
- NGA portal: http://nga.maps.arcgis.com/home/
- US State Department Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
Dams:
- http://globaldamwatch.org/good2/
- Global Reservoirs and Dams database (GRanD) http://globaldamwatch.org/grand/
- GlObal GeOreferenced Database of Dams (GOODD) http://globaldamwatch.org/goodd/
DEMs--Digital Elevation Models (Key Global Regional DEMs)
Disaster Risk:
- GAR 2017 Atlas Risk Data and Software Download Facility
- Disasters/hazards, Geologic:
DRGs (scanned maps)
Drought
- US https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools
- North America: https://www.drought.gov/nadm/content/welcome Monthly shapefiles back to 2002
- Global: https://www.drought.gov/gdm/content/welcome
Economic and demographic data
- American community survey
- American religion census, 1952-2010
- Broadband availability (CSV, with block codes)
- Bureau of Economic Analysis (Excel, which can be converted to CSV and then shapefiles)
- Population and population density
- World GDP from satellites (night lights)
- World population (TIFF grids)
Ecosystems: I was not able to actually find the coastline data (it might be in a monstrous mpk file, a nice proprietary ESRI product)
- Global Ecosystems, https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/ecosystems/datadownload.shtml ESRI mpk files, which QGIS might read
- Roger Sayre, Suzanne Noble, Sharon Hamann, Rebecca Smith, Dawn Wright, Sean Breyer, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Dabney Hopkins, Drew Stephens, Kevin Kelly, Zeenatul Basher, Devon Burton, Jill Cress, Karina Atkins, D. Paco Van Sistine, Beverly Friesen, Rebecca Allee, Tom Allen, Peter Aniello, Irawan Asaad, Mark John Costello, Kathy Goodin, Peter Harris, Maria Kavanaugh, Helen Lillis, Eleonora Manca, Frank Muller-Karger, Bjorn Nyberg, Rost Parsons, Justin Saarinen, Jac Steiner & Adam Reed (2019) A new 30 meter resolution global shoreline vector and associated global islands database for the development of standardized ecological coastal units, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 12:sup2, S47-S56, DOI: 10.1080/1755876X.2018.1529714
Energy
- Geothermal: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/data-geothermal.html
- Solar: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/data-solar.html
- Wind: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/data-wind.html
Environmental Atlas, EPA https://enviroatlas.epa.gov/enviroatlas/interactivemap/ environmental and demographic data
Fires (wildfire/forest fire)
Flood
- FEMA Flood Maps--data sold, but FIRMettes are free and could be registered. Some DFIRM sample data sets, but most cost $10.
- https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-hazard-layer-nfhl
- https://waterwatch.usgs.gov/?id=wwds_shp
- https://stn.wim.usgs.gov/FEV
Forests
- Global change, 2000-2019 http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest/download_v1.7.html
- Forests in west Africa, 50 cm imagery derived. Brandt, M., C.J. Tucker, A. Kariryaa, and K. Rasmussen. 2020. An unexpectedly large count of trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1832 https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1832
GADM: global administrative boundaries
Geodetic survey control
- NGS ground control points, shape file (all the resulting fields are strings, so you must fix, such as by writing to a CSV file and reimporting) (beta version, but still all strings)
- DSWorld--create KML file of survey points.
Geoid/Gravity
Geology
Glaciers
- https://www.glims.org/RGI/
- http://glims.colorado.edu/glacierdata/
- https://nsidc.org/data/g01130
Global DEMs
Google Earth data files
Hazards: https://hazards.geoplatform.gov/portal/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=ddf915a24fb24dc8863eed96bc3345f8 EPA county and census tract rankings of hazards (using likelihood and potential loss); shapefiles available
Health
- http://ghdx.healthdata.org/us-data By county, directions to enable use
- Health: http://www.healthdata.org/us-health/data-download has Excel spreadsheets with county names that could be joined to geographic shaperfiles. Alcohol, life expectancy, obesity, and physical activity.
- Demographic and health data from USAID https://www.dhsprogram.com/data/available-datasets.cfm
- https://vizhub.healthdata.org/lbd/malaria
Historic map scans
History
- Trans-Atlantic slave trade: https://www.slavevoyages.org/
Hydrography
Hydrologic predictions
- https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/download.php?wfo=ilm
- https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/index.php?wfo=ilm
Irrigated land percentages
KML for Google Earth
Lakes and wetlands from WWF: https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/global-lakes-and-wetlands-database
Land cover
Landslides
Laser altimetry: LVIS, ICESAT, and ICESAT-2
Lidar Point Cloud Data Sources
Mangroves: https://data.unep-wcmc.org/datasets/4
Nautical charts
Night lights
Noise: online maps, unclear how to get underdlying grids
- http://osav-usdot.opendata.arcgis.com/
- https://maps.bts.dot.gov/arcgis/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=a303ff5924c9474790464cc0e9d5c9fb
Oceanography
Online historic GIS
Piracy NGA's Anti-Shipping Activity Messages (ASAM): http://msi.nga.mil/NGAPortal/MSI.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=msi_portal_page_65--available as shapefile or KMZ
Planets and moons
- Mars MOLA 200 m DEM (account required)
- Mars data, MOLA tiles in IMG format: https://ode.rsl.wustl.edu/mars/indexproductsearch.aspx
- Planets and moons, imagery
PLSS (Public Land Survey System)
Population:
- http://www.worldpop.org.uk/data/get_data/ or https://www.worldpop.org/project/list
- https://ciesin.columbia.edu/data/hrsl/ 1 second data
- https://data.humdata.org/dataset/highresolutionpopulationdensitymaps Facebook data, currently for Africa, but more coming
- https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/data.php Global Human Settlement
Public Health/GIS
Redistricting
- https://redistrictingdatahub.org/ register, and download shapefiles (and other data, such as election by precinct)
Redlining (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, HOLC maps)
- https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=13/37.549/-77.517&city=richmond-va&text=downloads
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/24/climate/racism-redlining-cities-global-warming.html
Rivers and drainage basins
Roads
- Roads, US (also TIGER files from Census Bureau)
- Roads, World OpenStreetMap
Sea Ice and Glaciers
- Nordic Sea ice edge positions: http://nsidc.org/data/g02169.html (some data in shapefiles)
- Glacier data base: http://glims.colorado.edu/glacierdata/
- Randolph Glacier Inventory 5.0 (July 2015): http://www.glims.org/RGI/

SST or Sea Surface Temperature

Shorelines
Terrorism: Global Terrorism Database
Tidal flats (change detection from Landsat time series)
Urban expansion atlas has GIS data.http://www.atlasofurbanexpansion.org/
USTopo (DRGs)
Vegetation inventories
Water
- Water masks
- Conflict: https://www.worldwater.org/water-conflict/
Weather and climate
Wetlands: https://www.fws.gov/wetlands/index.html
WMS servers
- http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/example/services.html
Zip codes: ZCTA, Zip codes tabulation areas: TIGER files

Last revision 12/16/2020