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://www.measuredhs.com/

[Note: Registration & approval is required to access the primary/raw datasets, including surveys and GPS data. The primary datasets are available for valid purposes only. Secondary/summary data are available through STATcompiler. Image left from its report, GISs enhance Health Data]

The MEASURE DHS (Demographic and Health Surveys) project funded by USAID collects and disseminates demographic, health and nutrition data from developing countries. The raw data may contain geographic information collected with GPS. The geographic coordinates tell the location of surveyed communities and/or health facilities.

List of countries (in categories) was updated on 1/17/09.

http://www.hivspatialdata.net/

The HIV Spatial Data Repository provides geographically-linked HIV-related data for mapping in GIS. Data are provided in a form that allows GIS users to integrate their own GIS data to produce new analyses and mapping of HIV data.

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.