| Site |
Description |
| Natural Earth Data |
Social and physical shapefiles for all countries prepared at various scales; good for joining to countries and states/provinces, as well as providing context |
| New Jersey Geographic Information Network (NJGIN) |
Boundaries and major governmental features for the state of New Jersey, including municipalities/counties that can be joined to tabular data, and point locations for schools, EMS, and more |
| 500 Cities Data Portal |
Public health data tables that may be linked to shapefiles from the Census or other sources to montitor disease and health |
| GIS and Public Health at the Centers for Disease Control |
| NJ Department of Environmental Protection Open Data |
Land use and environmental data for the state of New Jersey; replacement for NJDEP digital data downloads web page: https://www.state.nj.us/dep/gis/listall.html |
| Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) |
Boundaries and point locations for the state of Pennsylvania |
| OpenDataPhilly |
Boundary, thematic data, point locations, and more for the city of Philadelphia |
| DVRPC GIS Data Portal |
Boundary, demographic, planning, structures, and transportation data for the Delaware Valley Region (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia in PA; and Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, and Mercer in NJ) |
| TIGER/Line Shapefiles |
US Census data for investigating social and demographic patterns across the United States at various scales and time-steps, including international data |
| Pre-joined ACS 5-year estimates with TIGER/Line Shapefiles |
| American Community Survey data tables |
| International Data Base |
| National Historical Geographic Information System |
This site contains historical census and other records, which may be joined to their historical shapefiles (note that boundaries of counties or election districts may have changed from recent versions!) |
| National Weather Service GIS Portal |
Current and historical weather and hazard shapefiles and tables |
| National Hurricane Center GIS |
Current and archive data for tropical storm events |
| Historical Urbanization Study |
This study offers the first spatially explicit dataset of urban settlements from 3700 BC to AD 2000, by digitizing, transcribing, and geocoding historical, archaeological, and census-based urban population data previously published in tabular form. Data tables included at end |
| POI Factory |
This is one of many sites that provides latitude/longitude coordinates for "points of interest," which may include restaurant locations, camp sites, or other information that users add to GPS or other system. Note that you need to edit the .csv files here in Excel to add headers to each column before importing to GIS software. |
| David Rumsey Map Gallery |
This site primarily includes old maps, which have been scanned and georeferenced, but may serve as stylistic inspiration or for comparision |
| William K. Morrison Special Map Collections at Nova Scotia Community College |
Another digitization project to scan old maps and atlases |
| Search! |
So many datasets can be found by entering keywords about your idea, along with "GIS Data" or "shapefile" into a search engine. Try it and see what you find! |