Food Deserts Excel workbook with data for US Census Tracts, indicating low levels of food accessibility broken down by race/ethnicity. The table can be joined to a GIS layer of Census Tracts.
Soil Surveys (US) The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Web Soil Survey (WSS) Database provides access to online interactive maps and downloads.
Soil Geography from NRCS compares some of the soil products.
Soil Data Access allows making SQL queries to retrive soil data that may not be available through other interfaces. Follow links to documentation.
Published soil surveys (all editions going back over 100 years), fom the USDA, as Adobe Acrobat documents. Also, the University of Alabama has digitized historic soil survey maps (maps only) into MrSID format (requires installing a viewer or browser plug-in).
Data for GIS Analysis Available at NACJDGeospatial data on crime at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data at ICPSR, often originally from US Dept. of Justice but also from other sources
School Attendance Boundary Survey (SABS) Effort to collect school attendance boundaries for public schools nationwide (inomplete). Mostly overlaps with SABINS (see above).
School Locations Point shapefiles and tabular data in Excel and SAS with address geocodes (estimated latitude/latitude values) and other geographic indicators to public schools, public local education agencies, private schools, and postsecondary schools.
Energy Information Agency (EIA)
Energy-Related LayersLinks to download shapefiles, or links to data and information at other agencies.
eGRID (Emissions & Generation Resource Integrated Database): the PLNT (Plant) file includes longitude and latitude coordinates for nearly 10,000 generating plants in the US, as well as technical and emissions data for each.
Surf Your WatershedData organized by watershed, mostly tabular data and narrative information
Federal Geographic Data Committee (FDGC)
FGDC "An interagency committee that promotes the coordinated development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis."
U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN)Download delimited text files of named features on USGS topographic maps. Includes latitude/longitude coordinates sometimes up to 7 places past the decimal.
EROS Data Center From the USGS; portal to lots of remote sensing and digital map data
Earth Explorer From the USGS; map interface to remote sensing data
GLOVIS Global Visualization Viewer: another interface from the USGS; requires Java
Hydrologic unit coverages at the 8- and 12-digit level of detail. Higher resolution than the layers from the National Map.
You can search for and get lots of information about particular watersheds (hydologic units) at the Surf Your Watershed web site, from the EPA
National Geospatial Programs Office (NGPO)
This is the USGS office that coordinates its National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) initiatives, with links to information about digital formats and to digital data, such as The National Map.
Protected Areas Data (PAD-US)
Lands in PAD-US are mainly open space/resource lands owned by agencies and non-profits (all federal and most state conservation lands, and many areas at regional and local scales), as well as conservation easements suitable for distribution in the public domain, with information on how they are being managed for conservation purposes.
WebGIS
Elevation data, Digital Line Graphs (DLG), and land use (LULC) as vector layers
Land Use/Land Cover: Digitized from paper maps from 1970s-1980s, so should be used for historical studies. Each 1:250,000 scale LULC quadrangle covers 2º of longitude E-W and 1º of latitude N-S. WebGIS provides an index graphic that allows you to click on the counties or to choose from an alphabetical list. It will then list all 1:100,000 quadrangles that cover at least part of that county.
You will need to join a dBase file to the downloaded LULC layer's attribute table in order to match English words to the numeric LULC classification codes. (Field LUCODE in the attribute table matches to LU2-CODE in the dBase file.)
BLM Navigator Publication site for data from the Bureau of Land Management. GIS layers to download, such as shapefiles and KMZ layers, and GIS services to connect to.
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
Earthdata Lots of remote sensing data as well as support materials such as software tools. Use the DAAC drop-down to go to NASA's Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs), which are discipline-specific data archives.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Data Resources: GIS data relating to renewable energy in the US (wind speeds, wave energy, solar potential). Some international data
Renewable Energy Data Explorer (REexplorer) Online mapping tool for visualizing energy-related map layers from selected non-US countries, most of which can be downloaded as GIS files.
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
National Ocean Service Data Explorer
Provides "centralized access to distributed NOS geospatial data, tools, applications and services." Includes access to:
NOAA nautical charts, bathymetry, and shoreline data
coastal change and analysis data: remotely sensed imagery and aerial photography (LiDAR and IfSAR data)
Benthic habitat maps, National Marine Sanctuaries boundaries and protected areas data
environmental sensitivity index maps; geodetic control benchmarks
coastal and marine observational data including real time tides and currents data for marine navigation.
NOAA Digital Coast Large repository of data and tools relating to coastal science and contributed by many partners. Includes over 2500 data layers that relate to Lidar, land cover, economic data (continental shelf, EEZ, etc.), electronic navigational charts, imagery, and much more. Includes over 70 tools to view or analyze such data. Includes some non-US data.
National Transportation Atlas Database
Online editions since 2011 for this set of databases, which include transportation facilities, transportation networks, and associated infrastructure. It includes attributes and metadata
