Geospatial & Mapping Data

Geospatial & Mapping Data is a rich starting point for anyone who needs to understand places, landscapes, infrastructure, climate, or populations through data. The resources here range from broad public data portals like Data.gov, data.gov.uk, and the European Data Portal to more specialized collections: USGS EarthExplorer for satellite scenes, aerial photographs, and cartographic products; NOAA Climate Data Online for historical weather and climate records; NASA Earthdata for Earth science datasets and tools; and OpenTopography for lidar, elevation models, and terrain analysis. For researchers working with people and places, IPUMS USA adds consistently documented U.S. census and ACS microdata, while ArcGIS Living Atlas offers ready-to-use basemaps, imagery, demographic layers, environmental data, and map-based apps for ArcGIS workflows.

What makes this subcategory especially useful is the mix of raw material and practical access points. Some listings are built for downloading authoritative datasets, others for searching by map, station, date, metadata, or area of interest, and several include training materials, visualization tools, processing workflows, or developer access. OpenStreetMap brings in the collaborative side of mapping, with browsable, exportable, and editable global map data, while Natural Earth is a friendly choice for cartographers who need clean, generalized world and regional map layers. Whether you are building a map, checking historical climate records, analyzing terrain, finding government open data, or preparing a spatial research project, these sources offer a grounded and credible place to begin.