Research Guides: GIS Data Sources: Sources by Place

Aggie Map
The official interactive map of Texas A&M University
PDF Maps of Texas A&M
Downloadable PDF maps of Texas A&M University
Texas A&M GIS Data
Basic GIS Data for Texas A&M University - College Station campus
Texas A&M Interactive Campus Map
Texas A&M interactive campus map for the College Station, McAllen, Galvaston, & Qatar campuses and the Law School and Health Science Center. Also includes a virtual tour option for the College Station campus.

In addition to the links below, the Libraries maintain an extensive GIS data collection of College Station, Bryan, and Brazos County including Historic Brazos County Appraisal District (BCAD) GIS Data. These BCAD files contain land, address and deed book information from 1999 to present (excluding 2006-2007) and are available to all TAMU affiliated library patrons upon request.

Please use our contact form to request local datasets.

Brazos County
Shapefiles of county and city limits, cemeteries, rivers, streams, railroads, roads, and 100-year floodplain.
Brazos County Appraisal District (BCAD)
Property search application displays the properties and associated tax reports. Only shows last month's report, if you need historic BCAD data, see below.
Brazos County Flood Map Modernization
Interactive Mapping Service offers preliminary flood insurance rate maps (FIRM). The final FIRM is available after the appeal process and the final determination is made.
City of Bryan GIS Map Services
Aerials, streets, new developments, school districts, capital improvements, cemetery (ownership and grave location), census, garage sales, and sex offender mapping services.
City of College Station GIS Department
City GIS files and maps.

Austin

Austin GIS OpenData
The Official City of Austin Open Data Portal
Capital Area COG Open Data Site
Geodatabases, shapefiles, and Google KMZ files of airports, bridges, streets, city limits, contours, county boundaries, flood zone, Envision Central Texas (ECT) Model, Hydrography, Land Fragmentation Analysis, Landfills, Orthos (1997-2008), Parcels (2005, 2008), topos, vegetation, soils, and more.
City of Austin GIS
Aerials (1962-2008), address points, utilities, topography, land use, zoning, environmental, transportation, base maps, and regional data.

Dallas

Dallas GIS OpenData
The City of Dallas's Official GIS Datasets
Dallas Central Appraisal District
Parcel information and links to parcel appraisal account information.
North Central Texas Council of Governments GIS Clearinghouse
GIS coordinator for 16-counties of North Central Texas, centered around the two urban centers of Dallas and Fort Worth. Geographic data for the NCTCOG region, as well aerial photography and digital elevation contours available for purchase by its members at a much-reduced cost.
Tarrant County Appraisal District
Shapefiles and maps of parcels; county, city, and school district boundaries; hydrography and more.

Houston

Houston GIS OpenData
GIS data and datasets provided by the City of Houston
City of Houston Geographic Information and Management System
Over 300 data layers. Portions of GIMS data is available only to City of Houston agencies, however some are accessible to the public. ROW and bikeways data are available only to view, but not for download.
City of Houston GIS Portal (COHGIS)
Clearinghouse for municipal GIS datasets for the City of Houston. Contains a link to Houston GIS OpenData and more. Datasets include: administrative boundaries, locations, routes, pavement, right-of-way, subdivision, and Lambert Facet Page--grids commonly used by Harris County Appraisal District and City of Houston Department of Public Works and Engineering.
Harris County Appraisal District GIS Data
Appraisal, city, college, county, emergency, fire, highway, school polygons, and other data.
Harris County GIS Data
Harris County data and more.
Harris County Public Infrastructure Department Engineering Division’s GIS Library
Available by contacting the Harris County Public Infrastructure Department Architecture and Engineering Division GIS Group.
Houston-Galveston Area Council Data Clearinghouse (HGAC)
Vector data covers only the H-GAC region; however, several are regional and statewide.

San Antonio

San Antonio GIS OpenData
Geospatial data and datasets provided by the City of San Antonio's GIS Division
San Antonio Geographic Information Services
Zoning, future land use plans, transportation, public safety information and more.

General

Texas Health Data
Texas Health Data is an interactive public data system that allows you to query DSHS public health datasets for statistical reports and summaries.
Texas Natural Resources Information System (TNRIS)
Through the Strategic Mapping Program (StratMap), TNRIS maintains statewide digital geographic data. Data available at different geographic levels.
Texas Tech's Digital Atlas of Texas Counties
Texas Counties data, including: relief maps (JPEGS), boundaries, roads, populated places, hydrology, census data, satellite imagery, and DEMs.
Texas State Data Center and Office of the State Demographer
Reference and thematic maps in PDF format, and TIGER census and congressional district data.

Oil, Gas, & Pipelines

Public GIS Map for Oil, Gas, and Pipeline Data - Online Map Viewer
Detailed information and location coordinates for oil wells, gas wells, and pipelines from the Commission's files with base map data captured from U.S. Geological Survey 7.5 minute quadrangle maps.

Texas Government

Texas Association of Regional Councils
Lists the 24 regional council of governments (COGs) in Texas. COGs often have a GIS department to produce and coordinate digital geographic data for their area of interest. Some COGS are more proactive in sharing data, but most have some GIS data to share even if it is not posted online.
Texas Legislative Council's District Viewer
Interactive maps; demographic and election reports for current state house, state senate, Texas Congressional, and State Board of Education districts; as well as selected redistricting proposals. All redistricting proposals that have been made public in the legislative process are available while they are under consideration.

Transportation

Texas Department of Transportation
COGs data, including: control sections, highways, imagery, Metro Planning Organizations (MPO), national highway system, railroads, traffic counts, and Texas trunk system routes. Also, a county grid map is available for printing.

Water / Hydrology

TAMU’s Texas Coastal Communities Atlas
Boundaries, policy data (coastal management zones and building code), transportation, census, rainfall, topography, ecological, hydrology, protected areas, recreation areas, development (property values, populated places, dams, and wetland permits), natural hazards, coastal development, and offshore risk data. Some open access layers are available to download as shapefiles.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality GIS (TCEQ)
Viewer dedicated to Eduard Aquifer that offers a spatial queries mapping application with SUPERFUNDS (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act) and MSD (Municipal Settings Designations) sites, and water wells data. GIS Data for the Atlas of Texas Surface Waters, hydrology, site layers of current locational data in TCEQ Program Area, TCEQ regulatory/administrative boundaries, and land use/land cover (LULC) layers are available to download.
Texas Water Development Board
GIS datasets of various natural features defined by TWDB. Data is offered in geodatabase or shapefile formats. Most requested maps are available as PDF/JPEG.

General

Data USA
Collection of US Government data in a single comprehensive visualization engine.
National Map (USGS)
High-quality, geospatial data and information from the USGS as well as other federal, state, and local partners. It includes orthoimagery, elevation, geographic names, hydrography, boundaries, transportation, structures, and land cover.
NASA Global Change Master Directory
Comprehensive list of GIS and geography related websites. It includes link categories such as U.S. federal Agencies, professional organizations, universities and research Institutes, and Commercial or Open Sources. The website allows searching datasets by topic, each one with a detailed description and its geographic coverage. Datasets are presented through web-based and desktop GIS interfaces.
USDA Geospatial Data Gateway
Natural resources and environmental data. The Gateway allows you to choose your area of interest, browse and select data from the catalog, customize the format, and have it downloaded via FTP site or shipped on CD or DVD. Themes include orthoimagery, soils, common land unit, cultural and demographics, geographic boundaries and places, elevation hydrography, cadastral, transportation, digital raster quads, land cover/vegetation/plants, watershed boundaries, wetlands, precipitation and temperature, flood hazards, and national inventory of dams/water control infrastructures.

Census Data

U.S. Census Bureau Data
Population, housing, economic, and geographic data from the U.S. Census
TIGERweb
US-wide census data.

Crime & Justice

Justice Atlas of Sentencing and Corrections
Data concerning residential distribution of people involved in the criminal justice system. It uses aggregated address data to map the flow of people being removed to prison, reentering communities from prison, and the standing population concentrations of people under parole or probation supervision. Data can be exported in in Excel, PDF, and JPEG formats.

Ecology

EPA Geospatial Data Access Project
Information regarding facilities or sites subject to environmental regulation. It features downloadable XML, KML, shapefiles, and feature classes. Datasets include Superfund National Priority List (NPL); EPA and State Treatment, Storage, Disposal facilities; Toxic Release Inventory System; National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Majors; Large Quantity Generators; Air Facility System, Corrective Actions; and more.
NOAA's National Climatic Data Center
World's largest active archive of weather and climate data. The center develops both national and global datasets.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Geospatial Services
Data at scales ranging from 1:12,000 to 1:500,000. They are organized by state with source, theme, spatial coverage, scale, metadata, and data link information available for each item. It also offers data from other agencies.

Elevation

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information
Interactive maps including data from the Earth and sun, including Earth observations from space and sea floor data. It offers software and conversion tools, as well as downloadable shapefiles extracted from interactive maps
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency GEOINT Services
NGA's GEOINT services, including DEM data of the Arctic and Combating Wildlife Trafficking.
USGS TopoView
opoView offers access to JPEG's, GeoTFF's, KMZ's, and GeoPDF's of the USGS's Historical Topographic Map Collection.

Energy

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Dynamically-generated maps of renewable energy resources. It also offers downloadable GIS data and geospatial toolkits via FTP.

History

Enhanced Historical Land Use/Land Cover (U.S. Geological Survey)
Land use/land cover from the 1970s and 1980s.
ICPSR's Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-2002
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research offers a census data collection that contains detailed county and state level ecological and descriptive data for the United States for the years 1790 to 2002. The TAMU community has direct access to download data by creating an account using the tamu.edu e-mail.
National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS)
Free, aggregated census data and boundary files for the United States between 1790 and 2000. The geographic units offered are state, county, county subdivision, census tract, block, block group, MSAs, place, voting district, zipcode, congressional district, etc. Data can be downloaded in ASCII, SPSS, SAS, STATA command file formatting, and comma or GIS comma-separated, column-delimited, and shapefiles data formats.

Housing & Urban Development

Federal Communications Commission
FCC licensing data, regulated towers and market area boundaries, including Cellular, Antenna Structure Registration, AM and FM databases.
United States Building Footprints
Dataset made available by Microsoft, contains 125,192,184 computer generated building footprints in all 50 US states. This data is freely available for download and use.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Collection of searchable datasets pertaining to urban development, including: fair market rents, public housing buildings, public housing developments, jobs proximity index, and many more.

Land Cover & Vegetation

CropScape
Cropland Data Layers (CDL) from the USDA. The CDL is a geo-referenced raster of crop-specific land cover created annually for the continental United States using moderate resolution satellite imagery and extensive agricultural ground truth.
EPA’s EnviroMapper
Environmental information, including: air releases, drinking water, toxic releases, hazardous wastes, water discharge permits, and Superfund sites.
EPA GIRAS
Land use/land cover data.
Multiresolution Land-Characteristics Consortium (MRLC)
National Land Cover Datasets.
USDA Web Soil Survey
Soil data and information produced by the National Cooperative Soil Survey. It is operated by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and provides access to the largest natural resource information system in the world, including soil maps and data for more than 95 percent of the U.S. counties. The electronic version of published soil surveys can be accessed here.

Transportation

Geospatial at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Official spatial repository for statistical data produced by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
National Transportation Atlas Database
National geographic databases of transportation infrastructure and facilities.

Water / Hydrology

DigitalCoast
Composes the National Coastal Assessment Framework (CAF), providing NOAA’s GIS data of counties, states, boundaries, watersheds, shorelines, etc.
NOAA's Historical Hurricane Tracks
Interactive mapping application created by the Coastal Services Center that features tropical cyclone data of both Atlantic and Eastern North pacific basins.

Pan-African

MadMappers
Free raster and vector data, aerials, GPS maps, DEMs, and satellite imagery. It also offers indexes and georeferenced topographic maps
World Resources Institute
This site provides comprehensive forestry data for countries within the Congo Basin. These resources contain shapefiles pertaining to conservation, extractive permits, towns, hydrography, road networks and factories, administrative boundaries, relief, and vegetation.

Kenya

Kenya Open Data
The Kenyan governmental open data site, with a range of data covering the areas of education, poverty, employment agriculture, justice and more.

Namibia

Digital Atlas of Namibia
Provides shapefiles and raster data that cover the climatological, physical, biological, cultural, and historical aspects of Namibia. It is based on data from a work,Atlas of Namibia Project (2002), attributed to the Directorate of Environmental Affairs within the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism (URL http://www.met.gov.na/about-met/environmental-affairs/273/ ).

South Africa

Biodiversity GIS
Wide range of biodiversity data for South Africa.
Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of South Africa
A wide range of GIS data related to agriculture, forestry and fisheries in South Africa

North America

North American Environmental Atlas
A collaborative initiative between government agencies in Canada, Mexico and the United States. It includes themes such as basemap, watersheds, terrestrial ecoregions, human influence, marine ecosystems, climate, and industrial pollution.

Canada

Atlas of Canada
Data of populated places, administrative boundaries, roads, railways, hydrology, bathymetry, glaciers, and sea ice. This portal also offers free base maps.
GeoGratis
Raster data, such as satellite images or scanned topographic maps, vector data, such as national-scale frameworks (grouped by theme), and a database of ground control points.
Natural Resources Canada - Geoscience Data Repository
The Canadian natural resources databases, available free of charge, including: maps, geophysical surveys, geochemical data, mineral and fossil fuel data, rock properties, marine geoscience, and more.
Natural Resources Canada - Data
Hydrology, temperatures, and petroleum.
Statistics Canada
Canada's central statistical agency. It provides data related to population, resources, economy, society, and culture. It offers tabular data, maps, and boundary files.

Guatemala

UIACC - Unidad de de Informacion Ambiental y Cambio Climatico
(Environmental Information and Climate Change Unit) Contains environmental reports for the forest and mangrove ecosystems(with maps in PDF format) as well as monthly climate status reports.

Mexico

Georeferenced Population Datasets of Mexico
1990 population for Mexican states, municipalities and islands. Data aligns with US TIGER data at US-Mexican border.
INEGI Digital Library
Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) INEGI offers mapping services and tabular data.

China

China Administrative Regions GIS Data: 1:1 M, County Level, 1990 by CIESIN
Boundary files covering the administrative regions of China. Data is offered at a scale of one to one million for national, provincial, regional, and county levels.
China Archive at Texas A&M University
Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Channel Data, NOAA AVHRR-based NDVI Data,Landsat TM, Land Use/Land Cover, World Database on protected areas (biosphere reserves), RAMSAR, and World Heritage sites. Basic data are also offered, including boundaries (province and county), digital elevation models (DEM), stream network, and transportation systems.
China Data Online
Formerly the China Data Center, the dataset integrates historical, social and natural science data in a GIS. Data is offered as tables, printable maps, and charts.
China Dimensions
A variety of socioeconomic data, including GIS databases that cover the administrative regions of China, presented at a scale of 1:1,000,000.
China Historical GIS
Database of populated places and historical administrative units for the period of Chinese history between 221 BCE and 1911 CE. CHGIS provides a base GIS platform for researchers to use in spatial analysis or to visualize the historical divisions of China as digital maps.
China In Time And Space (CITAS)
China in Time and Space (CITAS) is a project to create and maintain databases of spatially- and temporally-referenced data on China. Provides access to contemporary and historical information on China.
Diamond Bay Research
Chinese counties, census statistics and Digital Chart of the World China GIS layers.

General

DIVA-GIS
Free GIS data that are particularly useful for conduct research on biodiversity.
EarthStat
Created by the Global Landscapes Initiative and hosted by the University of Minnesota, includes: water depletion; cropland and pasture areas; harvest areas and yields for crops; yield gaps and climate bins; fertilizer applications, consumption, and balance; potential natural vegetation; and carbon stocks in potential natural vegetation.
FAO’s GeoNetwork
Open source of geospatial data that facilitates sharing geographically referenced thematic information between different organizations with the purpose of improving access and integrating use, support decision making, and promote multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable development. Data for different regions of the worlds are available on themes such as boundaries, agriculture, applied ecology, bio and ecological resources, climate, fisheries and aquaculture, forestry, human health, hydrology and water resources, infrastructures, LCLU, population and socio-economic indicators, satellite imagery, soils and topography.
FIRMS Web Fire Mapper
Global near real-time fire information to users to support natural resource and fire managers around the World. FIRMS delivers active fires detected using the MODIS active fire locations processed by the MODIS Rapid Response System. Active fire/hotspot detections in shapefile format are available for the last 24 hours, 48 hours and 7 day time periods. These shape files are updated every hour. Data in KML, NASA World Wind, Web Fire Mapper (WMS), and Climate Modeling Grid (CMG) are also available.
Global Administrative Areas (GADM)
Spatial database of world administrative boundaries (countries, provinces, departments, etc.). Data is available in various file extensions such as shapefile, geodatabase, KML, and R.
Map Library
Open source data site of Africa and Central America. It includes administrative boundaries, base maps, outline, and satellite imagery. It also offers global administrative areas with subdivisions such as provinces, departments, districts, and more.
Protected Planet
Database of protected land.
Urban Observatory
Interactive service used to contrast and compare maps of cities around the world, in a single location.
USGS Earthquake Hazards Program
Earthquake data in KML, CSV, and XML format. Different viewers, maps, and animations are available for real-time and historic earthquake data.
World Resources Institute - Maps & Data
Hosted by World Resources Institute, offers many maps in HTML or PDF format with different themes to show Earth trends. Maps are created using a variety of sources.
World Bank Data
Provides download access to over 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics from World Bank data sources.

Earth Imagery

ESA Satellite Images
Created by the European Space Agency (ESA), offers satellite imagery from around the world in the highest resolution available as TIFF and JPEG images. The gallery contains images used throughout the ESA Portal; most of them have been released publicly from ESA. You may use ESA images for educational or informational purposes.
USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS)
One of the largest collections of Earth imagery: satellite images and data, aerial photography, elevation and land cover, digitized maps, and more.
USGS Global Visualization Viewer (GloVis)
Online search and order tool for selected satellite and aerial data from EROS holdings. It allows browsing of images within USGS’ inventory. A download interface is provided for free datasets. Java required. GloVIS Next is currently being offered as an alternative.

Ecology

WDC for Human Interactions in the Environment
Created from WDC datasets and is hosted by NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). The web application allows viewing, activating, adding, and reordering available data layers from the SEDAC catalog. It also offers a map gallery for about 320 world and regions (JPEG/ PDF) on themes such as climate, conservation, governance, hazards, health, population, poverty and sustainability.
World Data System (WDS)
Global geophysical and environmental data along with associated documentation, and visualization and analysis tools. Access to data for all scientists is free of charge or for the cost of reproduction.

Elevation

USGS GTOPO30
Global digital elevation models (DEM) with a horizontal grid spacing of 30 arc seconds (approximately 1 kilometer).

Land Cover

webGIS
Global and U.S. datasets such as terrain, land use land cover, shoreline data, and basemaps. The data is obtained from government agencies and made available directly for download. It also offers links to other mapping services and websites.
USGS Land Cover Institute (LCI)
Assists in identifying suitable land cover data sets of the most accurate and up-to-date land cover data available. It provides links to organizations that distribute and use land cover data.
USGS Land Use Land Cover (LULC)
Historical land use and land cover classification data that was based primarily on the manual interpretation of 1970's and 1980's aerial photography.
USGS Landsat Look Viewer
Real-time images from Landsat satellites. It displays the images in the 5, 4, 3 (Red, Green, Blue) band combination for both the TM and ETM+ sensors at a resolution of 30 meters.

World / Climate

WorldClim – Global Climate Data
Global climate layers with 1-km2 resolution. Data is available for current, past, and future conditions in the forms of tiles or as grids.

United Nations Data

United Nations Data
UN statistical databases, tables, and glossaries containing over 60 million data points that include themes from agriculture, human development, technological developments, industry, and trade. Also available are millennium development goals and indicators.

Bathymetry

General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO)
Global bathymetric data, echo-sounding data; GEBCO Digital Atlas (GDA): global digital bathymetric contours, coastlines, trackline control data, and global one arc-minute bathymetric grid (GEBCO One Minute Grid).
Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS)
Data from the GCOOS catalog.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Marine geophysics: tracklines, gravity, sediment, water column sonar; Marine geology: geosample data, crustal age grids, NOS seabed descriptions, and ocean drilling; Ocean depths & relief: coastal grids, create custom grids, DEMs, ETOPO1, global grids, fishing maps, Great Lakes, Hydrographic surveys, IHODCDB, multibeam bathymetry, paleobathmetry, shorelines, and tsunami inundation.
Satellite Geodesy (UC San Diego)
Bathymetry and radar altimetry.

Shorelines

GSHHG (NOAA)
Global self-consistent, hierarchical, high-resolution geography database.
NGDC 3 Arc-Second Coastal Relief Model
U.S. coastal zone with view of the seafloor.
NOAA Shoreline Website
Global, national, and local scale shoreline data; Shoreline change analysis, nautical chart production, cartographic representation, and boundary determination.
Shoreline Data Explorer (NOAA)
Shoreline data of the U.S. and adjacent islands.

Nautical Charts

NOAA Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC)
Electronic navigational charts, digital hydrographic data, historical charts, and U.S. maritime zones.
NOAA Office of the Coast Survey
Local, regional, and global nautical charts and tools.

The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth
Over 600,000 astronaut photographs from 1961 through the present. A clickable map, mission-roll-frame search, and technical search are provided to find photos. Downloadable KML files for use in Google Earth are available.
MARS Global Dataset
Hosted by Arizona State University, offers interactive maps and downloadable data for Mars, in topics such as thermal infrared mosaics, shaded relief, and mineral maps among others. Shapefiles are not offered.