Access a large collection of maps, apps, and data layers from around the globe in categories such as basemaps, imagery, boundaries, people, infrastructure, and environment. Content marked as Premium requires an ArcGIS Online organizational account to access. To create your Ohio State ArcGIS Online account, refer to the getting started documentation at go.osu.edu/esri.
DIVA-GIS provides free geospatial data including administrative boundaries at both the country and global level. Other available datasets include global climate data, species occurrence data, and crop (genebank) collection data.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations maintains the GeoNetwork, which provides access to interactive maps, satellite imagery, and geospatial data in categories such as: agriculture and livestock, climate, fisheries and aquaculture, human health, population and socio-economic indicators, and more.
The Hand-in-Hand geospatial platform has brought together over a million datasets from 20 FAO units across multiple domains, including food security, crops and vegetation, livestock, trade and production, socioeconomic and demographic data, and more. Data has also been sourced from FAO partners and public data providers across the UN and NGOs, private sector and space agencies.
Contains a list of links to more than 500 sites providing freely available geographic datasets across physical and human geography categories, as well as for individual countries and areas.
GADM provides administrative boundaries for all countries and their lower level subdivisions. Data can be downloaded by country in a variety of formats.
The Humanitarian Data Exchange is an open platform for sharing data across crises and organizations to make humanitarian data easy to find and use for analysis. Organizations contributing datasets include the World Bank Group, UN Operational Satellite Applications Program (UNOSAT), the World Health Organization, Facebook Data for Good, and many more.
The International Historical Geographic Information System provides data tables from population, housing, and agricultural censuses from around the world, along with corresponding GIS boundary files.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Landscan Global datasets represent a global ambient population (average over 24 hours) distribution at approximately 1km spatial resolution. LandScan is available at no cost to the educational community.
Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales and designed to meet the needs of production cartographers. Includes a variety of datasets categorized in cultural vector data themes, physical vector data themes, and raster data themes.
OpenStreetMap emphasizes local knowledge and is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, buildings, and much more, all over the world. For small amounts of data, use the bounding box export functionality.
The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) EROS data archive is home to the world's largest collection of remotely sensed images of the Earth’s land surface. Product categories include aerial photography, digital elevation, land cover products, Landsat imagery, NASA LPDAAC satellite programs, vegetation monitoring, and more.
Earth Online is the earth observation data discovery platform of the European Space Agency (ESA). Access remotely-sensed data products from ESA missions, such as the Copernicus Sentinel program, along with data products from third-party mission partners.
Maxar releases open data, including pre- and post-event imagery, for select sudden onset major crisis events to support the geospatial community and humanitarian response efforts.
Earthdata provides a single search interface for discovering and accessing earth observation and other data products from across all of NASA's Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs).
Planet provides access to medium resolution (3-5m) satellite imagery, with global coverage and daily updates. University faculty and students can apply to the Education and Research Program for limited, non-commercial access to Planetscope Imagery and Rapid Eye Archive.
