GIS (Geographic Information Systems): Basic GIS Data

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. It includes both cultural and physical layers. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software. Natural Earth was built through a collaboration of many volunteers and is supported by NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society), and is free for use in any type of project (see our Terms of Use page for more information).

A spatial database of the location of the world's administrative areas (or administrative boundaries) for use in GIS and similar software. Includes countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, bibhag, bundeslander, daerah istimewa, fivondronana, krong, landsvæðun, opština, sous-préfectures, counties, and thana. GADM describes where these administrative areas are (the "spatial features"), and for each area it provides some attributes, such as the name and variant names.

Includes maps, apps, and data layers. Some content freely available, some available with UC Berkeley login. To access:
--> Click the "Sign In" button
--> Click the "Enterprise Login" button
--> Enter "cal" (no quotes) in the box to complete the URL and click "Continue"
--> Sign in using your CalNet credentials

The dataset is coded according to both the Correlates of War and the Gleditsch and Ward (1999) state lists, and is therefore compatible with a great number of existing databases in the discipline. Provided in a geographic data format, CShapes can be used directly with standard GIS software, allowing a wide range of spatial computations. In addition, we supply a CShapes package for the R statistical toolkit. This package enables researchers without GIS skills to perform various useful operations on the GIS maps.

The principal sources for these data are the most authoritative available: the session laws of the colonies, territories, and states that created and changed the counties. The Newberry Library makes these data available without charge over the Internet as shapefiles that users can download for use with geographic information system (GIS) software. Accompanying these data for each state and its counties are two versions of the essential metadata: one an extensive, detailed document following the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) model, the other a one-page summary. There also is a database that describes each change, provides the FIPS codes and complementary ID codes for all states and counties, and gives references to the authorities for every county change. A set of supplementary documents includes chronologies of changes, county areas in square miles for each version of every county, and a bibliography of the laws, maps, and other materials used to compile the boundary changes.