GIS & Geospatial Technologies: Sorted by Source

This site is maintained by the Planning Data & Systems Department of Campus Planning at UC San Diego. There is building information, GIS campus maps, 'neighborhood' plans of campus, CAD drawings, and GIS campus maps. Much content needs a password so contact them directly for access.

A very interesting initiative based at UC Berkeley using place as an organizing element for cultural information.

The Atlas of Global Inequality explores aspects of inequality using online, downloadable maps and graphics. All materials can be reproduced without charge if they are attributed to the UC Atlas of Global Inequality.

This guide covers resources and tools helpful for people interested in GIS & remote sensing. You'll find a link to access to their GeoData@UC Berkeley data repository and a guide of GIS data resources.

The home page of the agricultural GIS program at UC Davis.

The UC GIS Hub is a community to connect with colleagues across the University of California system and to talk, share, and learn about geospatial technology and its applications. The UC GIS Hub is also home to resources on geospatial software, data, training, and more.

Run by renowned Michael Goodchild and self described as: "Spatial@ucsb is an innovative university-wide resource and research center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Its mission is to facilitate the integration of spatial thinking into processes for learning and discovery in the natural, social, and behavioral sciences, to promote excellence in engineering and applied sciences, and to enhance creativity in the arts and humanities."

This Harvard-based online resource offers a way to interact and download datasets with respect to Africa. Their stated goals are to allow you to "interact with the best available public data for Africa, see the whole of Africa yet also zoom in to particular places, accumulate both contemporary and historical data supplied by researchers and make it permanently accessible online, and work collaboratively across disciplines and organizations with spatial information about Africa."

Centralized GIS organization for the California State University system. Appears to be a good model of coordination across a large distributed campus system.

A very rich website with lots of GIS data from Columbia University portals such as CIESIN (Center for International Earth Science Information Network), SEDAC (Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center), and the World Data Center for Human Interactions.

A very interesting initiative based at UC Berkeley using place as an organizing element for cultural information.

This is a great resource to find over 6,500 raster and vector layers of GIS data from around the globe as well as many georeferenced historic maps. You can search by metadata, by location, type of data and topic.

From OSU's Davey Jones' Locker, this is a great place to start any marine/coastal GIS project. Here you will find the full spectrum of links for agencies, bibliographies, conferences, data, labs, software tools and more.

This is a very comprehensive list of where to go to find GIS data by state, country or theme and was created by the GIS Services staff at MIT.

This site contains historic data regarding the Tijuana River watershed and the October 2003 San Diego Wildfires. File formats are Arc/Info export files and shapefiles respectively. It was previously hosted by the SDSU Dept. of Geography.

SFSU's GISc homepage.

Stanford's Geospatial Center homepage.

Excellent collection of Hawaiian aerial photographs and good links into Hawaiian, Pacific region and Asia/Australia GIS data. There is also available a set of Hawaii Historical Topographical Quadrangle Maps from 1910-1933.

You can download, for free, from NASA, the global ASTER DEM data here. You must register to do so!

A very rich website with lots of GIS data from Columbia University portals such as CIESIN (Center for International Earth Science Information Network), SEDAC (Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center), and the World Data Center for Human Interactions.

FIRMS was developed by the University of Maryland, with funds from NASA’s Applied Sciences Program and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, to provide near real-time active fire locations to natural resource managers that faced challenges obtaining timely satellite-derived fire information.

Earthdata from NASA holds more than 35,000 Earth science data set and service descriptions, which cover subject areas within the Earth and environmental sciences. NASA's former Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) was rolled up into this. You can switch between various Distributed Active Archive Center (DAACs). Data and information are filtered by nine key topics: Atmosphere, Biosphere, Cryosphere, Human Dimensions, Land Surface, Ocean, Solid Earth, Sun-Earth Interactions, and Terrestrial Hydrosphere. Explore the datasets within your topic of interest.

Here you can browse and download imagery of satellite data from NASA's constellation of Earth Observing System satellites. Over 50 different global datasets are represented with daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots, and images are available in a variety of formats including JPEG, PNG, Google Earth, and GeoTIFF.

CoRIS is the Coral Reef Conservation Program's (CRCP) information portal that provides access to NOAA coral reef information and data products with emphasis on the U.S. states, territories and remote island areas.

A portal into coastal GIS data, tools and information about NOAA's work in this discipline. Products include sea level rise viewer, LiDAR and elevation data, historical hurricane tracks, land cover atlas and other.

The International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) provides location and intensity for global tropical cyclones. The data span from the 1840s to present, generally providing data at 3-hour intervals. While the best track data is focused on position and intensity (maximum sustained wind speed or minimum central pressure), other parameters are provided by some agencies (e.g., radius of maximum winds, environmental pressure, radius of hurricane force winds, etc.) and are likewise provided in IBTrACS. Files are available subset by Basin or time period, where basins include: East Pacific, North Atlantic, North Indian, South Atlantic, South Indian, South Pacific, and the West Pacific. Time periods include: All data, since 1980, and the last 3 years. IBTrACS was developed collaboratively with all the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Regional Specialized Meteorological Centres, as well as other organizations and individuals from around the world.

National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) is NOAA’s focal point for coastal ocean science efforts. The datasets available on this Data Collections and Project-Related Resources site are products of NCCOS Research Projects. Themes include: Benthic Habitat Mapping, Biogeographic Assessments/Ecological Characterizations, Long-term Monitoring, and Regional Ecosystem Science.

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is responsible for preserving, monitoring, assessing, and providing public access to the Nation's treasure of geophysical data and information. This is the top level of the links into space weather, solar events, bathymetry, global relief, marine geology, natural hazards and geomagnetic data and models.

The NWS GIS data page links to shapefiles and KML formats, web services, and basemaps for watch/warning advisories, grid and operational forecasts, flashflood and precipitation data and more.

Climate Data Online (CDO) provides free access to National Climatic Data Center (NCDC's) archive of global historical weather and climate data in addition to station history information. These data include quality controlled daily, monthly, seasonal, and yearly measurements of temperature, precipitation, wind, and degree days as well as radar data and 30-year Climate Normals.

You can download near real-time satellite products and modeled Outlooks related to coral reef environmental changes. Includes coral bleaching events, sea surface temperatures, monitoring stations and other data.

The imagery posted on this site was acquired by the NOAA Remote Sensing Division. Imagery can be found for storms or hurricanes dating back to 2003

According to NOAA, "this site highlights the uses of GIS in the fisheries service and...the agency's publicly available spatial data is listed on the site, as are useful GIS tools and links to interactive mapping sites and external fisheries data.

A NOAA Data Search Platform. Geophysical, oceans, coastal, weather and climate data discovery all in one place. The OneStop Project is designed to improve NOAA's data discovery and access framework. As of August 2024, OneStop has 108,087 collections and 3,352,693 granules available to search.

The purpose of this site is to eliminate confusion about vector shoreline data by providing information about and access to shorelines that are generated by federal agencies. The site was developed and designed by the NOAA Office for Coastal Management.

NCEI and the IHO Data Center for Digital Bathymetry (DCDB) archive and share depth data acquired by hydrographic, oceanographic, and industry vessels and platforms during surveys or while on passage. These data include national and international mapping bathymetry projects.

Open source, free to you! Self-described as "particularly useful for mapping and analyzing biodiversity data, such as the distribution of species, or other 'point-distributions'".

Downloadable OpenStreetmMp data for world regions, updated almost daily (select Region, then country).

This free ebook by Tomislav Hengl provides a great guide to geostatics and mapping using open source tools.

Free and open access to global development data

This site contains cropland data layers from 1997 to 2010. Data is downloadable and the interface is user-friendly. Enjoy it and thanks to the USDA folks for providing it.

U.S. Forest Service Ecoregions Center portal to the description, evaluation and mapping of large areas where similar ecosystems recur in predictable patterns. Links to other resources, maps and GIS data downloads are available here.

This data set site covers subjects such as animal product, all matter of agriculture, food, policies, research, rural economy and trade and international markets.

A product of the USDA, this food atlas also has a downloadable Excel document so you can create your own foodshed maps and documents.

Data collected and managed by Forest Service programs is available for download. Data relates to forestry, recreation and environmental topics.

Here you can choose to download natural resource data for the United States from the USDA. Data is free for the most part if downloaded.

This geographic data site for Africa is made possible by the UN FAO and contains data on Burundi, DR Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Please read the site carefully to see what you can download and the restrictions of use for the data.

Supply of data sets used by UNEP- has 450+ variables with national, subregional, regional and global statistics and geospatial data sets. Themes include Freshwater, Population, Forests, Emissions, Climate, Disasters, Health and GDP. Dynamic searches for many different nations, regions, cities, etc.

A product of the UN FAO, this site is a great place to look for data on political boundaries, agriculture, climate, fisheries, forestry, water, land cover/use, population data, soil info and topo info.

This is a high level site from a part of UNESCO that contains links to portals for ocean related data on a global scale. GIS data is on some of the sites, but this site is much better used to determine if there is an entity doing marine work in your area.

The World Environment Situation Room (WESR) is the new United Nations (UN) Environment Programme data platform that provides federated environmental data access at the global, regional, national and local levels for sustainable development and national planning needs. The WESR data system brings together over 45 data platforms and 70 data sources. Regions: Africa, Asia & Pacific, Latin American and Caribbean, Europe, North America, and global.

This database allows you to download "all the GIS and attribute data for nationally designated marine and terrestrial protected areas with and without IUCN Protected Area Management Categories assigned, non-designated national protected areas and areas defined under international conventions and agreements."

U.S. Forest Service Ecoregions Center portal to the description, evaluation and mapping of large areas where similar ecosystems recur in predictable patterns. Links to other resources, maps and GIS data downloads are available here.

Data collected and managed by Forest Service programs is available for download. Data relates to forestry, recreation and environmental topics.

This is a good place to look for imagery from the USGS including Landsat, AVHRR and aerial photography from now and the past.

This USGS site offers downloads in geodatabases or shapefiles of the USGS National GAP data on Species, Land Cover, and Protected Areas of the United States.

This gazetteer is a key resource to find the official name, latitude and longitude of domestic, foreign, Antarctic or undersea features. Note that if you are looking for foreign names, the link on the GNIS will take you to the GNS (also available as a link on this guide).

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) from USGS is updated every two to three years and stands as the definitive land cover database for the United States.

PAD-US is America’s official national inventory of U.S. terrestrial and marine protected areas that are dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity and to other natural, recreation and cultural uses, managed for these purposes through legal or other effective means. PAD-US also includes the best available aggregation of federal land and marine areas provided directly by managing agencies.

From the Western Coastal and Marine Geology site of the USGS, this is where you can download GIS data layers for shoreline change in California.

From the Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies site of the USGS, this is where you can download GIS data layers for shoreline change in the Gulf of Mexico.

From the Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies site of the USGS, this is where you can download GIS data layers for shoreline change in the Southeast Atlantic coast.

The National Map Viewer (TNM Viewer) is the one-stop destination for visualizing all the latest National Map data and deliver topographic information for the Nation. The National Map supports data download, digital and print versions of topographic maps, geospatial data services, and online viewing. The geographic information available from The National Map includes boundaries, elevation, geographic names, hydrography, land cover, orthoimagery, structures, and transportation

USGS site which has links to GIS data and data sources pertaining to border issues and environment health initiatives.

The top site for planetary GIS data for Mars, the Moon, Venus, and other celestial bodies surrounding Earth.

Downloadable GIS data for the United States, with some datasets also for the entire world. Includes DEMs, DLGs, the National Elevation Dataset (NED), GTOPO30 and the HYDRO1KM datasets.

This site, by the University of California Santa Barbara, has links to the indexes and scans of California topographic maps.

An easy way to find out what topo map covers the area of the United States that you are interested in.