GEOSPATIAL DATA REPORT : Finding and Using GIS Data

http://na.unep.net/datasets/datalist.php

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) / Global Resource Information Database (GRID) Spatial Data Clearinghouse offers a variety of global and international spatial datasets.

Datasets available are:

• Africa Population Distribution Database – years 1960, 70, 80, 90 & 2000
• Asia Population Distribution Database – year 1995
• Asia Administrative Boundaries – years vary
• Asia Towns/Cities point data with population – 1995 estimated & other pop years vary
• Latin America & Caribbean Population Distribution Database – years 1960, 70, 80, 90 & 2000
• Latin America & Caribbean Soil & Terrain Database
• Global Population Distribution Database – 1990
• Brazil Datasets – Soils & Vegetation

http://www.maplibrary.org/stacks/gadm/

“GADM is a database of the location of the world’s administrative areas. Administrative areas in this database are countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, districts etc. GADM has been developed as part of the BioGeoMancer project. It was partly funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore foundation. The work was done at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and the International Rice Research Institute by Robert Hijmans, Nell Garcia, Julian Kapoor, Arnel Rala, Aileen Maunahan, and John Wieczorek.” – accessed on 5/27/09 – read more on the website above.

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/data_analysis.html

“NREL’s GIS Team develops technology-specific GIS data maps for a variety of areas, including biomass, geothermal, solar, wind, and renewable hydrogen” and made available their data in either high resolution or low resolution.

I thought these data are just for U.S. but in fact, wind high resolution data for some international countries (Afghanistan, Armenia, Bhutan, Central America, Chile, China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Indonesia, Mongolia, Philippines, Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates) are available from this site.

For U.S. the followind data categories are available:

• Biomass
• Hydrogen
• Other
• Solar
• Wind

http://eusoils.jrc.it/esdb_archive/EuDASM/indexes/access.htm

Various sets of historical soil maps are available for downloading from the European Digital Archive of Soil Maps (EuDASM) hosted by the Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IES) in the European Commission. The map were scanned in high resolution but are not georeferenced.

Map images are grouped by region:

• Africa
• Asia
• Canada
• Caribbean Islands
• Europe
• Latin America
• United States

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2006/1179/

Another USGS Open File report, 06-1179. This site offers various GIS project data, presenting the results of a petroleum resource assessment of Northern Afghanistan, and other data used in the petroleum assessment. Geologic, structural, field, well, political, and other GIS layers covering Afghanistan, Northern Afghanistan and adjacent areas, along with associated geochemical and other data tables pertinent to a petroleum assessment are included.

http://geode.usgs.gov/

Or, you may access files directly from this site : http://geode.usgs.gov/ftp/
(Files are sort of organized by country/region, but not always. The trick to find files for your study area is to read a page HTML file carefully – the source HTMLs can be found in: http://geode.usgs.gov/download/ or http://geode.usgs.gov/projects/)

Use GEO-DATA Explorer (GEODE) to access, view and download natural and energy resource data. Data have been collected from the USGS Energy Resources Program and other agencies and made available by the National Oil and Gas Assessment and the World Petroleum Assessment. Most base maps (boundaries, city points, hydrography, etc.) seem to be extracted from DCW (Digital Chart of the World) and thus not unique.

World resources dataset contains coal, petroleum, oil, gas and natural gas liquids information as well as geologic data.

Regional and national datasets for selected regions and countries are also available from this site.

Note: Data availabilities vary depending on regions and countries – good amount of data is available for South America, for example. It is kind of a messy dataset, though – their file organization is terrible. File names are inconsistent and some metadata files are available only from the FTP site mentioned above.

http://www.aims.org.af

The AIMS project is building information management capacity in government and delivers information management services to organizations across Afghanistan. Visit also this GIS/Mapping Services website to obtain geospatial data in shapefiles.

Data files included are:

• Political and adminitrative boundaries
• Hydrography (rivers, lakes and watersheds)
• Transportation
• Landocver
• Settlements
• Health facilities, etc.

http://afghanistan.cr.usgs.gov/downloads.php

Download comprehensive geospatial datasets for Afghanistan from this site, organized and managed by USGS. The data files include: Landsat and ASTER imagery, airborne imagery, SRTM DEMs, Soviet topographic sheets, and geological and geophysical datasets.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/2007/245/

The 50 tiled images in this dataset are natural-color renditions of the calibrated six-band Landsat mosaics created from Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data. Each map quadrangle is 1° of latitude by° of longitude.