Geospatial Data

North American Land Change Monitoring System

Published by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, these land use and land cover rasters (see photo at the top of this post) are derived from MODIS imagery at 250 meter resolution for earlier years and either Landsat-7 or RapidEye imagery at 30 meter resolution for later years for Canada, the United States, and Mexico in 2005, 2010, and 2015. There are layers for both land cover and land cover change over a 5-year period. Land cover is classified into 19 categories based on UN FAO standards. It’s easy to download as the layer is unified (no individual tiles to mess with and stitch together) and for the 2015 series you can choose a national file or one for the entire continent.

PRISM Climate Data

Published by the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science & Engineering at Oregon State University, the PRISM Climate Group publishes climate data for the United States. You can generate daily, monthly, or 30-year normal rasters for temperature (min, max, mean), precipitation, dew point, and a few other measures for the continental US. There are also some prepackaged files that were created for special projects that cover Alaska, Hawaii, and some of the US territories. The site is very easy to use (certainly compared to other sites that provide climate data) and beyond its research applications the data is good for teaching purposes, as files are straightforward to create, download, and interpret.

Marineregions.org Marine Boundaries

I usually help people find vector boundaries for terrestrial features, and the oceans are an afterthought that appear as the absence of land. But what if you specifically needed features that represent oceans and seas? Marineregions.org, maintained by the Flanders Marine Institute, provides many sets of water-based boundaries that include maritime regions (legal sea zones around countries) as well as polygons that represent the boundaries of the oceans and largest seas (IHO Sea Areas, defined by the International Hydrographic Association). See the screenshot of this layer in QGIS below.

GNSS Time Series

Produced by NASA JPL, this dataset can be used for measuring vertical land movement (VLM) and subsistence, primarily due to movement of the earth’s tectonic plates. The dataset contains over 2,000 GPS observation points or stations; the majority are in the US but there are a scattering of points throughout the world. The data file for geodetic positions and velocities contains two records for every station: the POS (position) record provides data for the latitude (N), longitude (E), and elevation (V) in mm. The VEL (velocity) indicates the rate of movement over the time period by direction (N / E) and elevation. The last three columns for both sets of records are margins of error for each value. The data file is in a fixed-width text format. To use it in GIS you need to parse the data into a tabular format and drop the header information. When plotting the coordinates, the CRS for the geodetic file is IGS14 (EPSG code 9019). If your CRS library doesn’t include this system, it is roughly equivalent to ITRF2014 (EPSG code 7789).

Subnational Population Data

IPUMS Terra

Are you looking for population or socio-economic data for the first-level administrative divisions (states, provinces, departments, districts, etc) for many different countries? IPUMS Terra is part of the IPUMS series at the Minnesota Population Center, Univ of Minnesota. The data has been gathered from census and statistical agencies of individual countries, or in some cases from estimates generated by the project. Choose the "Create Your Custom Dataset" option, then on the next screen choose "Start Extract Area Level Output". On the Extract Builder (see pic below) choose variables on the left, like Demographic and Total Population. Then under Datasets on the right you can choose countries and filter by year. Once you move on to the next screen, you can choose to harmonize the output or choose specific years, and choose your administrative level: national, ADM-1, or smallest available. You must register to use the IPUMS data series, but registration is free for educational and non-commercial use (as long as you cite IPUMS as the source).

Subnational Human Development Index

An alternative for first-level admin data is the Subnational Human Development Index published by the GlobalDataLab at the Institute for Management Research at Radboud University. There are far fewer variables and less customization compared to IPUMS Terra, but as such the site is smaller and easier to use. There are several different indices for measuring human development, but you can also access the following indicators: life expectancy, GNI per capita, expected and mean years of schooling, and population size in millions.

Historic Global Population and Economic Data

Maddison Project

Yes, that’s Maddison with two "ds". This project from the Groningen Growth and Development Centre at the University of Groningen generates comparative economic growth, income, and population data for countries over a long historical time span; back to the year AD 1 in a few cases, but for the most part from AD 1500 forward. They provide detailed documentation that explains how the dataset was created, and it’s easy to download in either an Excel or STATA format.

The World Countries Urban Population

This dataset consists of two spreadsheet files – one for the total urban population and another for the urban ratio of the population for countries going back to the year 1500. The dataset was created by Jonathan Fink-Jensen at Utrecht University and is held in the International Institute of Social History’s data repository. The repository contains a variety of other historic socio-economic datasets for many different countries.