GIS & Geospatial Technologies: Sorted by Type

The LidarExplorer was created primarily to enable identification of lidar projects having 3D visualization enabled (via Entwine) - giving users a mechanism to visualize the Lidar through web-based 3D viewers like Potree. Currently, not all the Lidar published by the USGS is available in the Entwine Point Tile (EPT) format. Downloads for the DEM products and Source products are provided in such a way to easily compare coverage and download sizes based on a user-defined Area of Interest (AOI). Finally, LidarExplorer provides a mechanism for deriving products from Lidar using cloud processing capabilities that take advantage of the publically available EPT Lidar data and the Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL).

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

The California Seafloor Mapping Project (CSMP) has high-resolution geologic and habitat base map series covering all of California's 14,500 km2 state waters out to the 3 mile limit,

Learn about LIDAR, links to download data U.S. LiDAR data.

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

Just what it says! Here you can download GIS data for the Mojave Desert including elevation data, satellite imagery, landcover data, transportation data and science-related data.

Provides access to high-resolution topographic and bathymetric data for scientific, environmental, engineering and planning purposes. A great resource for accessing global LiDAR, DEM products. You can also generate derivative products such as hillshade and slope. You can also clip the data to return only an area of interest.

Download data from SRTM here. Version 2 is available- it comes with the water bodies and coastlines.

This interface attempts to ease the pain of downloading 30-meter resolution elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Click on yellow tiles to download their corresponding data. A NASA Earthdata login is required to download the files.

The NASA Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) has provided digital elevation data (DEMs) for over 80% of the globe. The SRTM data is available as 3 arc second (approx. 90m resolution) DEMs. A 1 arc second data product was also produced but is not available for all countries. The SRTM 90m DEM’s have a resolution of 90m at the equator, and are provided in mosaiced 5 deg x 5 deg tiles for easy download and use. All are produced from a seamless dataset to allow easy mosaicking. These are available in both ArcInfo ASCII and GeoTiff format to facilitate their ease of use in a variety of image processing and GIS applications. Data can be downloaded using a browser or accessed directly from the FTP site.

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

This site has over 40,000 images of the California coast from Oregon to Mexico. Some sites have historic images from 1972 and there is a feature on the site to do a time comparison. May be useful in coastal GIS projects as a supplement rather than image analysis source.

The Copernicus Open Access Hub (previously known as Sentinels Scientific Data Hub) provides complete, free and open access to Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-5P user products, starting from the In-Orbit Commissioning Review (IOCR).

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

EROS is home to the world's largest collection of remotely sensed images of the Earth’s land surface and the primary source of Landsat satellite images and data products. NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) is also located at EROS. Use the links on this site to explore and access the data holdings.

Free access to the 1:50000 and 1:250000 scale topographic data as well as other national datasets in GIS format. It is operated by the Earth Sciences Sector (ESS) of Natural Resources Canada.

A great free online resource to download a variety of imagery products (Landsat, SRTM, Geocover) and a few vector products (World Protected Areas). Also provides good information on each type of imagery and how it can be used. Users should go to the ESDI site to download and explore imagery.

This satellite imagery dataset produced by a variety of global partners provides "the highest resolution land cover map that has been completely validated" with an overall accuracy of 73% and classified into 22 land cover classes.

A US government portal for geospatial data and information. Can sometimes download GIS files, sometimes only do online mapping. Good for finding the agencies that do GIS data for a particular topic, but can be a little bit frustrating if you are wanting

Historic aerial imagery of some areas of the United States ranging from the 1960s to 2005. There is a tool to compare imagery across multiple years. This is free imagery, but comes with an extensive watermark on it.

This online web GIS will allow you to find watersheds in California with some historic aerial photographs. Zoom in (but not too close) to your area of interest and then use the Query tool to see what results are in your area.

The MODIS instrument operates on both the Terra and Aqua spacecraft. It has a viewing swath width of 2,330 km and views the entire surface of the Earth every one to two days. Its detectors measure 36 spectral bands between 0.405 and 14.385 µm, and it acquires data at three spatial resolutions -- 250m, 500m, and 1,000m. The many data products derived from MODIS observations describe features of the land, oceans and the atmosphere that can be used for studies of processes and trends on local to global scales. MODIS products are available from several sources, listed here.

This consortium of federal agencies is dedicated to developing and maintaining national orthoimagery coverage in the public domain.

This NOAA site contains links to climate and weather data, much of which can be downloaded as PDFs or shapefiles. Take your time to choose which product will work best for your needs. Also check http://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/Portal/ as a way to access GIS data from NCDC.

Provides access to high-resolution topographic and bathymetric data for scientific, environmental, engineering and planning purposes. A great resource for accessing global LiDAR, DEM products. You can also generate derivative products such as hillshade and slope. You can also clip the data to return only an area of interest.

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

The Historic County Borders Project digitized the borders of the historic counties of the UK and has made them freely available for public and commercial use.

This site allows you to query approximately 350,000 Canadian geographic place and physical feature names by name, coordinates or other unique codes.

An integrated geographical data resource with information on cities of 1000, 5000 and 15,000, postal codes, feature data and more. All data is free with a Creative Commons license.

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).

This is a key resource for finding non-United States geographic feature names.

A status map for California indicating the status of 3DEP compliant lidar and where other, non-3DEP lidar may also be available.

Provides access to high-resolution topographic and bathymetric data for scientific, environmental, engineering and planning purposes. A great resource for accessing global LiDAR, DEM products. You can also generate derivative products such as hillshade and slope. You can also clip the data to return only an area of interest.

UNAVCO promotes research by providing access to data that our community of geodetic scientists uses for quantifying the motions of rock, ice and water that are monitored by a variety of sensor types at or near the Earth's surface. Data types include GPS/GNSS, SAR and Lidar/SfM, strain and seismic borehole data, and Tropospheric data

The United States Interagency Elevation Inventory is a nationwide listing of known publicly available high-accuracy topographic and bathymetric source elevation data for the United States and its territories. The inventory provides a single resource for information about all known completed and in-progress broad-area public domain elevation data. The inventory displays data set boundaries and provides information about the elevation data but does not host the data itself. If available, links to access the data, metadata, and reports are included.

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"

Here you can access online maps of religion in both the United States and worldwide. There are statistics and lists by county and denomination for other information, and the description of the sources can lead you to more information.

Just as the title says, this online mapping and trend visualization tool helps to investigate US demographic trends.

This is an online mapping resource for the City of Los Angeles, created by their Department of City Planning. It is designed to provide zoning related information for specific properties. You CANNOT download data from here.

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

Blog devoted to Google Maps mashups. Related to GIS and shows the creativity of the Internet community!

A US government portal for geospatial data and information. Can sometimes download GIS files, sometimes only do online mapping. Good for finding the agencies that do GIS data for a particular topic, but can be a little bit frustrating if you are wanting

A project by Harvard-MIT's Division of Health Sciences & Technology, this online mapping site allows you to map diseases across the globe. Very interesting and shows how geography can display patterns in a way that other forms of information cannot.

Developed by one of Germany's re-insurance companies, Munich Re, this online mapping tool allows you to look at natural hazard maps, major disasters and countries profiles. ONLY WORKS WITH INTERNET EXPLORER 6 or higher.

This non-profit conservation organization is a partnership of different entities providing extensive GIS data for animals and plants. There is downloadable data as well as online mapping of species distributions.

Good tool to do simple online mapping with Census data. This has a free and subscription version and UCSD does not currently hold a subscription.

Specific EPA mapping of toxins and superfunds sites in San Diego County

A product of the San Diego Natural History Museum, the Mammal Atlas uses GIS data to show mammal occurrence records.

A product of the San Diego Natural History Museum, this online mapping site allows you to pick a plant and map it using a Google Maps application.

An online crime mapping website from ARJIS (Automated Regional Justice Information System. The crime mapping application allows you to select a location, incident type and time period to map. Map can be exported and data can be copied/pasted into a table to then be used in a GIS.

Google Maps based project showing the locations of all solar powered buildings in San Francisco. An innovative and interesting project idea.

Online mapping tool for US census data from 1940 to current day. Very easy to use.

Online mapping and GIS data download for United States raster and vector data layers or subsets thereof. A good resource for basic US data and global imagery.

A quick and interesting way to do online mapping for environmental contaminants and toxins from a government source.

A website with interactive maps of historical redlining. Users can click on the designated category and read the descriptions of the areas from a redlining perspective. Very very interesting commentary. Uses GIS to manage this data and present it.

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.

Beta site for an online collaborative crime map. As of July 2008, it has more resources for non-US countries.

A great site that has a collection of world maps where the countries are sized according to the subject they are displaying i.e. fuel exports, incomes, violence, religion, education and the like.

Free tool to do online geocoding of lists. Very easy to use. Requires a free registration but handy for displaying information (and geocoding it) quickly and easily.

Here you can access online maps of religion in both the United States and worldwide. There are statistics and lists by county and denomination for other information, and the description of the sources can lead you to more information.

Quarterly count of employment and wages reported by employers covering more than 95 percent of U.S. jobs, available at the county, MSA, state and national levels by industry. No shapefile, but can get the data and join to an existing gis file.

This site has transportation tables that are included in the Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP). Tables are downloadable and then usable in GIS with the FIPS identifier.

ePodunk provides in-depth information about more than 46,000 communities around the country, from Manhattan to Los Angeles, Pottstown to Podunk. Our listings also include geocoded information about thousands of parks, museums, historic sites, colleges, schools and other places across America. "

This ESRI site allows you to look up demographic data by zipcode and runs through their Business Analyst Online product. It's free but requires an updated version of Silverlight to be installed so do keep that in mind!

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

This software allows you to create your own maps and visualizations of your own data...it looks like it has great potential but I can't vouch for it personally!

The official mapping and GIS agency of Mexico. Their website is in Spanish and offers links to census products and GIS data. If you are a part of UC San Diego, we have own a digital collection of Mexico topo maps that you can use, so just contact us in the Geisel Library building!

A computing language and an "environment within which statistical techniques are implemented". Becoming increasingly used in conjunction with GIS analysis.

This site is devoted to creating, developing, managing and disseminating transportation statistical knowledge. While it does not have GIS data, it has tabular information about transportation (aviation, ferries, trucking, border crossings) that could be used in GIS.

Excellent site for free GIS data specific to San Diego County. Also created some new visualizations using GIS data that are interesting to see. To get to the Data Warehouse, go to the left side navigation under "Resources" and choose "Demographics and

The Data & GIS Services Program promotes data sharing and updating to enhance southern California region-wide GIS data standardization and helps SCAG maintain effective working relationships with its member cities and key stakeholder agencies. Currently 79 local jurisdictions and two partner agencies.

Typically the first place to go to for US Census information for 1990 and 2000. Can download Census data in a variety of ways. Not suitable for Census data other than 1990 or 2000 (NHGIS is a resource geared towards historical census data and is far better for this use.)