Data Download Guide
Geospatial data is often the most important and time-consuming part of any GIS project. There is a proliferation of geospatial data online, but finding accurate and trust-worthy data requires careful selection.
Most city, state, and federal government agencies have their own websites called ‘open data portals’ where geospatial data is stored. It is often a good starting point to search the web for your study area name + “gis data” or “open data portal”.
The Evans Map Room has an extensive research guide for GIS data. Click on different tabs on the left side to see data for different locations and purposes.https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/gisdata
Other universities often have helpful guides for finding data as well:
MIT– https://libguides.mit.edu/gis/world
UC Berkeley– https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/gis/data
Cornell– Geolode contains a collection of all open data portals around the world: https://geolode.org/
New Hampshire and Vermont Data Sources
NH Granit– The state of New Hampshire maintains a geospatial portal, NH GRANIT, to publish data, which includes physical and environmental topics, sociodemographic factors, state infrastructure, and more: https://www.nhgeodata.unh.edu/
Vermont Open Data Portal– The state of Vermont has their own geospatial portal to publish data about a wide range of topics: https://geodata.vermont.gov/
United States Data Sources
Data.gov– This is the repository of data for the federal government and includes datasets from many government entities. https://catalog.data.gov/dataset
US Census Bureau– The Census Bureau publishes social, economic, and demographic data for the United States. It can be an extensive downloading and cleaning process; for more information, check out our census data download guide.
The National Map– USGS has various applications for downloading data about different topics, including Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), contours, land use, LiDAR, and more. Check out the different applications here: https://apps.nationalmap.gov/
World Data Sources
Natural Earth– Natural Earth has a wide collection of data showing the physical and cultural features of the world. This can be useful for downloading data of administrative boundaries for countries, states, provinces, etc., or rivers, streams, and oceans. You can download data at different scales based on the type of map you want to create. The data often do not contain much information, so it is mostly used for cartography. https://www.naturalearthdata.com/
Open Street Map– This is a crowd-sourced database where users create features about the Earth including roads, buildings, transit, etc. OSM can be useful in areas with limited data availability, or to find more unusual data. OSM is often difficult to navigate, but can be downloaded via Geofabrik or plug-ins for QGIS and ArcGIS. https://download.geofabrik.de
World Bank– has datasets on many topics from many different countries. https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/home
USGS EarthExplorer– EarthExplorer contains imagery and elevation data. For more information on how to use the interface, check out our data download guide. https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/
Living Atlas– produced and curated by Esri, this site has a collection of data on various topics and locations around the world. It can be accessed directly from ArcGIS Pro or ArcGIS Online. Some layers are published but not permitted to download or edit. https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/home/