Free GIS Datasets - Categorised List

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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).

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This list was last updated on 1 July 2025.

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.
  • 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

  • HydroSHEDS: Hydrological data and maps based on the STRM elevation data. Includes river networks, watershed boundaries, drainage directions and flow accumulations for the globe.
  • Catchment Characterisation and Modelling: Data on river basins, catchments and rivers for the European Union area.
  • Major Watersheds of the World Deliniation: Vector data showing the outlines of major watersheds (river basins) across the world.
  • Water Isotopes: Global grids of hydrogen and oxygen isotope composition of precipitation and environmental waters in ArcGRID format. Data can be downloaded for whole globe or individual continents.
  • JRC Water Portal: European water data from the EC Joint Research Centre, including data on quantity, quality, price, use, exploitation and irrigation.
  • General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans: A range of gridded bathymetric datasets compiled by a group of experts.
  • EarthEnv Freshwater Ecosystems Environmental Information: 1km-resolution environmental information for freshwater ecosystems, covering almost the whole globe. Information includes climate, land-cover, soil and geology.
  • Global River Widths from Landsat (GRWL): Dataset containing information on widths of rivers (max, min, mean, median for each segment of river) across the world, derived from Landsat data.

Snow/Ice

Natural Disasters

  • Natural Disaster Hazards: Hazard Frequency, Mortality and Economic Loss Risk as gridded data for the globe. Covers cyclones, drought, earthquakes, flood, landslide, volcano and a combination of them all ('multihazard').
  • USGS Earthquakes Database: KML files of all earthquakes recorded by the USGS (across the whole world) from 1973 to present. Available as one dataset or grouped by magnitude or year.
  • Global Seismic Hazard Map: Gridded data showing hazard risk of seismic activity across the globe.
  • IBTrACS: Hurricane and tropical cyclone tracks, including attributes such as minimum pressure, maximum winds. (Also, USA tracks can be visualised here)
  • NOAA/WDC Historical Tsunami Database: Location information of tsunami sources and run-up events, including many attributes (eg. maximum water height, travel time). Available in TSV format which can be imported into GIS systems.
  • MODIS Fire Detection Data: Frequently updated data (including last 7 days of fires) in 1km grid format, derived from thermal anomalies from MODIS data.
  • Lightning and Atmospheric Electricity Datasets: Wide range of data on lightning activity, including average flashes per grid cell per year.
  • NOAA Historical Hurricane Tracks: Hurricane tracks for all North/Central American hurricanes. Data can be exported by clicking the Download button on the top right.
  • Natural Disaster Hotspots: A wide range of geographic data on natural disasters (including volcanoes, earthquakes, landslide, flood and 'multihazards') with hazard frequency, economic loss etc.

Land Cover

(See also Land Use below)

  • Corine Land Cover Map: Europe only. Satellite derived land cover, available as at 1990, 2000 and 2006 in vector and raster formats. 100m and 250m resolutions.
  • GLOBCOVER: Global land cover dataset at 300m resolution from the MERIS sensor on the ENVISAT satellite.
  • Climate Change Initiative Land Cover map: Global land cover dataset at 300m resolution, for 1998-2002, 2003-2007, 2008-2012. In many ways the 'successor' to GLOBCOVER.
  • MODIS Global Land Cover: 1km and 4km resolution global land cover maps derived from MODIS images.
  • UMD GLC: 1km resolution global land cover maps from the University of Maryland created using a classification tree approach from MODIS data
  • EarthEnv Global Consensus Land Cover: 1km-resolution global land cover, produced by integrating many other land cover datasets, and providing information on the consensus (or lack of consensus) between them
  • Global Land Cover by National Mapping Organisations: 1km data of land cover for the globe, with a classification scheme based on the UN FAO LCCS, facilitating easy comparison with other land cover products.
  • GLC-SHARE: Global Land Cover data combined from 'best available' national land cover maps. 1km resolution.
  • Global Lakes and Wetlands Database: Global vector datasets showing areas of lakes, reservoirs, wetlands, swamps, bogs etc.
  • Grassland GIS: Grassland extent data, along with grassland usage (eg. livestock intensity per area of grassland)
  • Forest GIS: Percentage tree-cover, population density and tree cover, share of wood in fuel consumption etc.
  • PALSAR Forest/Non-Forest map: A very detailed (50m resolution) forest map for the whole globe, created from SAR data.
  • Global Forest Change 2000-2014: Loss and gain in tree cover between 2000 and 2014, globally, at 30m resolution.
  • CROPGRIDS: comprehensive global, geo-referenced dataset providing area information for 173 crops circa the year 2020, at a resolution of 0.05˚ (~5.6 km at the equator)
  • High Resolution Canopy Height Maps by WRI and Meta: Forest canopy height data for the whole world, generated from AI mapping of high-resolution aerial imagery. See here for a review/analysis of the data.

Environment & Ecology

  • Atlas of the Biosphere: Raster maps of environmental variables including soil pH, potential evapotranspiration, average snow depth and many more.
  • Lifemapper: Species distribution maps - both recorded and predicted (based on climate, terrain and land cover). Covers a huge number of species. *Data is available by clicking on Species Archive, searching for a species and then clicking on the number of points and choosing the SHP link at the top. Alternatively, web services are available.
  • WWF World Ecoregions: Shapefile of ecoregions as defined by the WWF Conservation Science Program.
  • Ecoregions 2017: a new map and a major update of the 2001 WWF Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World, depicting 846 ecoregions that represent our living planet. The shapefile can be downloaded under the 'About' link.
  • Anthropogenic Biomes: Ecosystem unit maps derived from human interactions with ecosystems creating 'anthropogenic biomes'. Gridded data at 5 arc-seconds available.
  • Amphibian Species Distribution Grids: Approximately 1km resolution gridded data showing species distribution. One file per species.
  • Net Primary Productivity: Gridded Net Primary Productivity data across the globe, including a novel measure of 'Human Appropriation of NPP' measuring how much of the NPP of an area humans are using.
  • World Soil Information: Gridded datasets covering the world's soils at a maximum resolution of 5 arc-minutes with 22 attributes for each cell including organic carbon content, gypsum content, water capacity etc. Data is given for topsoil and subsoil. More detailed datasets for individual countries and continents are available.
  • Harmonized World Soil Database: Combining regional and national soil databases and maps from many countries under the Land Use Change programme of the UN FAO. Includes soil units and parameters (such as pH, depth, and texture) and is at a resolution of 30 arc-seconds.
  • Global High Resolution Soil Water Balance: Raster data containing actual evapotranspiration and soil water deficit with a resolution of 30 arcseconds (approx 1km).
  • Ocean Carbon and Acidification Data System: A wide range of ocean carbon and acidiication datasets, collected from research vessels and model outputs
  • Total Carbon Column Observing Network: Observations of total carbon columns in the atmosphere from Fourier Transform Spectrometers
  • UNEP WCMC: Variety of datasets from the United Nations Environment Programme including global wetlands, global distribution of coral reefs, mangrove distributions and more.
  • Aquamaps: Standardised distribution maps for over 11,000 species of fish, marine mammals and invertebrates. *Data available for download under High Resolution Maps and Environmental Data links.
  • Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: Vector data showing a biogeographic classification of terrestrial ecological regions across the world.
  • Freshwater Ecoregions of the World: Vector data showing a biogeographic classification of freshwater ecological regions across the world.
  • Marine Ecoregions of the World: Vector data showing a biogeographic classification of marine ecological regions across the world.
  • BioFRESH: Contemporary distributions of freshwater species, mapped in vector format across the world
  • Global Habitat Heterogeneity: A set of 14 metrics on the spatial heterogeneity of global habitat, at 1km, 5km and 25km resolutions, derived from MODIS EVI data.
  • The Nature Conservancy - Geospatial Conservation Atlas: Various interactive maps and downloads of conservation data, including Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, Coral Reefs, Mangroves and more.
  • Global High Air Pollutants: Global high-resolution (1km, daily) data on air pollution, derived from satellite data, ground data and models. Click the GHAP link at the top.
  • Water Productivity through Open Access of Remotely sensed data (WaPOR): Data to monitor and improve water and land productivity in agriculture, including evapotranspiration, interception, net primary productivity and more.

Mineral Resources/Oil and Gas

Human Geography

General

  • UNEP GEOdata: A wide range of data from the United Nations Environment Programme including Nighttime Lights, Pollutant Emissions, Commercial Shipping Activity, Protected Areas and Administrative Boundaries. To get data, choose Advanced Search and select Geospatial Data Sets from the top drop-down link
  • World Bank Geodata: A wide range of World Bank datasets converted to KML format, includes GNP, schooling and financial data.
  • Humanitarian Response Common and Fundamental Operational Datasets Registry: List of freely available datasets for many countries run by the UN Humanitarian Response programme. Contains administrative boundaries, transport, population and more. Fairly empty at the moment but due to be updated soon
  • Atlas of the Biosphere: Gridded human data including per capita oil usage, literacy rate, population growth rate, built-up land and many more.
  • Koordinates: GIS data aggregation site including data in a number of categories such as administrative boundaries, transportation etc. Some global datasets, some based on continents, some for specific countries. Mostly vector, but some raster. Registration required
  • ESPON Grid Data: Various human geography indicators in gridded raster form across Europe, including GDP, population and unemployment in 2003 and 2006.
  • MapCruzin: GIS aggregation site including wide range of data for various areas of the world. Some data 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).
  • Google Maps Gallery: A wide range of user-submitted geographic data, available as a KML file
  • History Database of the Global Environment: Gridded time-series of population, land-use for the last 12,000 years. Also includes GDP, agriculatural areas, yields and greenhous gas emissions for the last century.

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.
  • Geoboundaries: Geographic boundaries dataset, for academic and commercial use. Over 1 million boundaries within 200 countries.
  • 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)
  • 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)

  • Global Land Use Dataset: Gridded data at 0.5 degree resolution showing population density, potential natural vegetation, cropland extent, grazing land extent, built-up land extent, crop extent (for 18 major crops) and land suitability for cultivation
  • Human Influence and Footprint: Human Influence Index and Human Footprint calculated from various factors which exert human influence on ecosystems, for example population distribution, urban areas, navigable rivers etc. Available at 30 arc-second resolution.
  • Global Agricultural Lands: Extent and intensity of use of agricultural lands (both cropland and pasture) in 2000 from MODIS and SPOT images and agricultural inventory data.
  • Global Irrigated Area and Rainfed Crops Areas: Vector mapping of global irrigated cropland and rainfed cropland.
  • Crop Calendar GIS: Gridded data on planting dates and harvesting dates across the world for 19 crops. Available at 5 minute and 0.5 degree resolutions.
  • EarthStat: Agricultural Land Use and potential use: A number of GIS datasets on agricultural land use, including global cropland and pasture from 1700 to 2007, harvested areas and yields for 175 crops, and global fertiliser application rates.
  • European Urban Morphological Zones: Data derived from the CORINE landcover dataset showing all sets of urban areas lying less than 200m apart.
  • Global Human Settlement Layer: Multi-temporal data on built-up areas, including population, settlements and degree of urbanisation.
  • Global Urban Footprint: Global map of built-up areas at 12m resolution.
  • Bing Global Building Footprints: Global building footprints, derived by machine learning from Bing aerial imagery, and released by Microsoft
  • WorldCereal: global cereal crop maps at 10m resolution, plus more to come in future

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.

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. (Click 'Maps' then 'Accessibility' and look for the download icon)
  • 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.
  • Facebook Movement Range maps: Data on how populations were responding to the COVID-19 social distancing measures, in terms of 'Change in Movement' and 'Stay Put'.
  • Facebook Social Connectness Index: Measures the strength of connectedness between two different geographical areas as represented by Facebook friendship ties.

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.

Individual Country/Area Datasets

Afghanistan

Antarctica

  • Antarctic Digital Database: Compilation of medium-scale topographic data for Antarctica, managed by the British Antarctic Survey.
  • Quantarctica: A huge set of Antarctic datasets, including basemaps, elevation, satellite imagery, glaciology and geophysical data. Provided in a 7Gb package with QGIS, all set up for viewing, or available through FTP for individual datasets.
  • US Antarctic Resource Centre: Scanned topographic maps, LiDAR-derived DEMs at approx 5m resolution and some aerial photography. Click the links on the left to select different datasets
  • Australian Antarctic Data Centre: Data from the Australian antarctic programme, including sea ice data, maps and aerial photography.
  • National Snow and Ice Data Centre: A wide range of Antarctic data from the US-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre
  • Polar View - Antarctic Node: Synthetic Aperture Radar, plus derived sea ice concentration and ice charts for download, covering the Antarctic coast.
  • BEDMAP2: The second, and significantly improved, version of datasets for ice bed, surface and ice thickness in Antarctica.

Arctic

Argentina

Australia

Austria

  • 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

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

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. The original site is offline, this is a mirror in GeoJSON format on Github.
  • 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
  • China High Air Pollutants: Daily high resolution (1km) air pollution datasets for China, derived from satellite data, ground measurements and models

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

  • Dataforsyningen: 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

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

  • BD TOPO: General vector map, including buidings, roads, water etc
  • 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
  • Geolittoral: Coastal GIS data for france, including orthophotos, coastal paths, marine data, ports etc.In French
  • BD ORTHO: High-resolution aerial photography for France, available as RGB and Colour-Infrared. Download by department.
  • PARCELLAIRE EXPRESS: Land parcels, downloadable by department.
  • National Address File: Point locations for all addresses in France

Germany

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

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

Ireland

Italy

Japan

Kenya

  • 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.

Nepal

  • ICIMOD: 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

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.

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

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)

  • General
    • OS OpenData: Many Ordnance Survey mapping products available in both vector and raster formats. Resolutions from 1:250k to 1:10k as well as detailed gazateers, boundary datasets and post-code point locations. Now also includes topologically correct road and river networks, and more detailed topographic map data.
    • Data.gov.uk: Huge amounts of data, a fair proportion of which is georeferenced.
    • MAGIC Datastore: A wide range of datasets for the UK including boundaries, pipelines, urban areas, health and safety and more. Many entries in the database are links to other sites and some require registration.
    • New Popular Edition OS Maps: Scans of many of the (out-of-copyright) New Popular Edition OS maps from the 1940s and 1950s. Available to view online and to download by contacting the authors.
    • Guardian Datablog: Wide range of data, mostly UK-focused but some international, collected by The Guardian newspaper in the UK.
    • Environment Agency GeoStore: A wide range of GIS data from the UK Environment Agency, including canal/river data, listed buildings, environmental restrictions, protected areas and more.
    • DataMapWales: A wide range of geographic data for Wales, mostly environmental and natural resources related.
    • Automatic Knowledge Resources: A wide range of data, collated and organised from various open sources, including basic GIS data (buildings, roads, rail etc) by local authority, general election results from 2019, deprivation data and more.
  • Ecology
    • Natural England Open Data Portal: Natural landscape boundaries including areas of National Parks, National Nature Reserves, SSSIs, Common Land, AONBs, Bogs, Mudflats etc.
  • Rivers
    • OpenRivers: Topologically-corrected river dataset, suitable for hydrological modelling, created from Ordnance Survey data
  • Oceanography
    • Marine Scotland Interactive: A range of data on the seas around Scotland, including monitoring stations, renewable energy, protected areas and wildlife data.
  • Atmosphere, Weather and Climate
  • Energy
  • Historical Data
    • Great Britain Historical Database Online: Historical statistics linked to spatial areas including census data, births/marriages/deaths statistics and many others.
    • Atlas of Rural Settlement in England: GIS data of the maps from Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmella's An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England, including extensive metadata. Includes locations of settlements, provinces and regions as well as terrain types and more.
  • Geology
  • Population
    • ONS Open Geography Portal: Downloadable data from the Office for National Statistics, including census data, administrative boundaries, postcode locations etc.
    • Census boundary data: Boundaries for census data areas, for both current and historical censuses
    • OpenPopGrid: An open gridded population dataset for England and Wales, produced using dasymetric mapping to assign population numbers only to areas containing residential buildings.
  • Transport
  • Education
    • Edubase: Data from the UK Government on all educational establishments (Nurseries, Primary Schools, Secondary Schools, Universities) in England and Wales. To download data, click Subscribe on the left and register. Two downloads are permitted per year.
  • Buildings and Points of Interest
    • Postbox locations: Locations of Royal Mail postboxes across the UK, derived from a Freedom of Information request to Royal Mail, plus OpenStreetMap data. Provided in tab-separated format, with latitude and longitude co-ordinates
    • Open Postcode Geo: 'Value-added' UK postcode data, excluding Northern Ireland, containing hierarchical postcode areas (districts, sectors etc) as well as latitude/longitude, easting/northing and more.
    • Postcode boundaries: Similar to the above, but more up-to-date, and generated from CodePoint Open.
    • Postcode boundaries: Similar again, this time calculated from ONS's NSUL dataset.
  • Misc
    • Police data archive: Police data showing all recorded crimes and their location, type and eventual outcome.
  • City-specific

United Arab Emirates

United States of America (USA)

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

  1. Who are you?

    I'm Robin Wilson, a freelancer in GIS, remote sensing and data science. For more information see my freelance website and blog.

  2. Why did you create this?

    I kept coming across GIS datasets online that looked like they might be useful - for my research, my friends research, or just for fun! I thought I'd keep a list of the ones that looked good - and then decided to put it online so that other people could benefit from it too. Fast-forward a few months and this is what you have: over three-hundred links, and hundreds of hits per day.

  3. Where did you find the datasets?

    A variety of places really. Some I knew about already, and some I had used in my research (or read about in the scientific literature). Others I came across online, particularly through GIS.SE and the GIS LinkedIn group. A number of items came from a wide-range of people who sent me links, asking me to add them to this site.

  4. What are the requirements for a dataset in this list?

    As you might guess from the title - I only list free GIS datasets here. That word is rather ambiguous (just ask Richard Stallman!), but here I use the meaning of 'free as in beer', and I include sites that provide data free for non-commercial purposes. Funnily enough, given the title, I don't link to datasets that cost money!

  5. Is there anything I can do to help?

    I'm glad you asked - of course there is! Three things really: you can tell your friends and colleagues about the site (see the Facebook and Twitter links on the top-right?), you can email me information about new datasets to link to (see below), and you can donate some money (see that button on the top-right?) to help me cover the costs of hosting this.

  6. How can I contact you?

    Email me at robin@rtwilson.com and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

    Please don't email me about commercial datasets (I'm not interested) or to ask me if I can get hold of data on a particular topic. Every dataset I know about is listed on this site!