Download data by country
Select and download free geographic (GIS) data for any country in the world
Sources
Subject | Description | Source | Format | Resolution |
Administrative areas (boundaries) | Country outlines and administrative subdivisions for all countries. The level of subdivision varies between countries | GADM, version 1.0 | Vector (area) | - |
Inland water | Rivers, canals, and lakes. Seperate files for line and area features | Digital Chart of the World | Vector (line and area) | - |
Roads | Roads | Digital Chart of the World | Vector (line) | - |
Railroads | Railroads | Digital Chart of the World | Vector (line) | - |
Elevation | SRTM30 dataset. CGIAR-SRTM data aggregated to 30 seconds | CGIAR SRTM (3 seconds resolution) | Grid | 30 seconds |
Land cover | Land cover, original data resampled onto a 30 seconds grid | GLC2000 | Grid | 30 seconds |
Population | Population density (old) | CIESIN, 2000. Global gridded population database | Grid | 30 seconds |
Climate | Monthly climate data | WorldClim | Grid | 30 seconds |
Gazetteer | A gazetteer is a list of place names and their coordinates. The files you can download here are for use in DIVA for automatic georeferencing (to assign coordinates to places). The files should be placed in the |
U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency's (NIMA) database of foreign geographic feature names | DBF | - |
Formats
The files have been compressed and grouped in ZIP files. You can use programs such as 7-zip, PKZIP or StuffIt to decompress the files.
Vector data are stored as ESRI shapefiles Grid (raster) data are stored as DIVA gridfiles
Each "shapefile" consist of at least three actual files. This is a commonly used format that can be directly used in Arc-anything, DIVA-GIS, and many other programs. It can be imported to most other GIS programs. Shapefiles contain a single class of "vector" data such as points, lines, or polygons.
Gridfiles are used in DIVA-GIS. From DIVA-GIS they can be exported to a number of other grid formats including IDRISI and Arc or to shapefiles. (More info on format; for developers).
A gridfile with "country mask" indicates that the areas outside the selected country are masked out. For these areas, the value is "NODATA" (indicating the absence of data for those cells). For the other gridfiles, NODATA is only used for areas covered with water, except for the land cover grids, on which water is a separate class.
A DBF (dBase file) is a dbase format database table.