International GIS Data: Global

Two letter codes most often used to identify countries.

Three letter codes.

American standard that has been withdrawn, but still may appear in older documents.

Boundaries of subnational administrative districts.

Over 8 million geographical features with name, feature class, and latitude and longitude.

Generalized boundaries for political and physical features in shapefile format. Useful for map-making but not for applications requiring precision. Can also be downloaded as subsets from WeoGeo.

Shapefiles of data sets necessary for humanitarian response, listed by country. From UN OCHA.

Historical national boundaries and capitals of the post-WWII period.

International boundary lengths between 1815 and 1997. In Excel or Stata format.

Extracts from crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data.

Believed to be the most accurate available worldwide international boundary vector line file.

USGS data covers not just the U.S., but the world. Includes the 1 km resolution GTOPO30, the 30-, 15-, and 7.5-arc-second GMTED2010, and 3-arc-second SRTM.

The UN Environment Programme's Global Resource Information Database hosts GRID's core datasets and links to related geospatial environmental data platforms and databases. In GRID, shapefile, or TIF format, depending on data set.

Offers a wide selection of global, regional, and national datasets and map images for administrative and political boundaries, agriculture and livestock, applied ecology, remote sensing, biological and ecological resources, climate, fisheries and aquaculture, forestry, human health, hydrology and water resources, infrastrcture, land cover and land use, population and socio-economic indicators, soils and soil resources, and topography.

Datasets focusing on human interactions in the environment.

From the USGS, geologic spatial data by region.

Ecosystems, inland fisheries, reefs at risk, and mining impact in shapefile or Esri GRID format, depending on file.

Global fire locations and burned area information in shapefile, KML, or WMS formats.

Data available as Google Earth KML, ESRI Arc Binary, ASCII and LAS ffile fromats.

Gridded population and land use for the past 12,000 years.

Esri GRID or GeoTIFF.

30 arc-seconds grid.

Global past and present day anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants by country and on spatial grid.

Elevation contours derived from SRTM data, in shapefile format.

Shapefiles of habitats of endangered species.

Biological and physical spatial datadownloadable in shapefile or GRID format. U.S. emphasis, but some international data sets. Requires free Esri Global Account.

Ecosystem boundaries in shapefile and KML format.

WWF’s Global 200 project analyzed global patterns of biodiversity to identify a set of the Earth's terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecoregions that harbor exceptional biodiversity and are representative of its ecosystems.

Time-series analysis of 654,178 Landsat 7 ETM+ images in characterizing global forest extent and change from 2000 through 2014

Georeferenced armed conflict data, as shapefiles.

Locations of aid activities in Excel format with latitude and longitude. Worldwide coverage for World Bank and African Development Bank activities; also comprehensive aid activities for Malawi.

In shapefile and Excel formats.

Ethnic group territories represented as polygons in shapefile format.

Economic output per 1-degree grid cell, for 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005. in Excel format with latitude and longitude.

Portal for humanitarian data managed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Gridded population at 1 km resolution.

Microfinance and financial exclusion data, some of it downloadable as CSV or Fusiontable formats.

Poverty indicators for select developing nations.

Locations from World Database of Protected Areas, including UNESCO sites. Downloadable as KML or shapefile.

Subnational demographic estimates as well as national and subnational HIV prevalence, in shapefile format. Requires free registration.

Georeferenced data from Demographic and Health Surveys..

Combines the best available roads data by country into a global roads coverage, joined topologically at the borders.

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a format for sharing public transportation schedules and associated locations. Consult this tutorial to convert to shapefile or KML.

In Esri GRID format.

Location, characteristics of, and the facilities and services offered by major ports and terminals in tabular or shapefile format.

World climatic data (monthly mean temperature and rainfall) in BIL and Esri GRID format.

Georeferenced crop planting and harvesting dates, in ArcINFO ASCII format.

Data on crops, vegetation, and more.

1985-present. Shapefiles.

Hydrology.

Shapefiles of International Hydrographic Organization boundaries and others.

Climate, discharge, runoff, land cover, dam density, irrigation and population data at the country or river basin level, in shapefile format.