Data Sources
- One of the largest places to search for data is Data.gov - "home of the U.S. Government's open data". Billed as a one-stop-shop for everything and anything that is publicly available, it has, as of 2015, nearly 140,000 datasets in areas as varied as agriculture, climate, education, oceans, and science & research. This plethora of datasets is accompanied by filters, which allow you to refine the dataset options and make it easier to navigate, and include filtering options by topic, dataset type, tags, format, organizations, and publisher.
- United States Geological Survey - The USGS is a science organization that provides impartial information on the health of our ecosystems and environment, the natural hazards that threaten us, the natural resources we rely on, the impacts of climate and land-use change, and the core science systems that help us provide timely, relevant, and useable information.
The USGS has a tremendous amount of digital map data available to the public. While essentially all of these links and this data is available via the Data.gov website linked above, these direct links to smaller data sets might prove useful and more time efficient for some researchers to have them separated out.
|
Product |
Search or Order |
| DEM – Digital Elevation Model | http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ http://seamless.usgs.gov/ |
| DOQ – Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles | http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ http://seamless.usgs.gov/ |
| DLG – Digital Line Graphs | http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ |
| DRG – Digital Raster Graphics | http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ http://seamless.usgs.gov/ |
| National Map – Resource for GIS data of maps, imagery, and land use, also obtain elevations of properties | http://nationalmap.gov |
| National Map: Historical Topographic Map Collection | http://nationalmap.gov/historical/ |
| Seamless Database – Free download of imagery and elevation data | http://seamless.usgs.gov |
| GeoSpatial One Stop – Resource of Federal, state ,and local geographic data | https://catalog.data.gov/dataset |
| National Geologic Map Database – Resource for maps and related data about: geology, hazards, earth resources, geophysics, geochemistry, geochronology, paleontology, and marine geology. Search can be limited to digital data only. | http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ngmdb/ngm_compsearch.html |
| NHD – National Hydrography Dataset – digital spatial vector data of surface water features such as lakes, rivers, streams, and wells |