Data
So much data, so little time… Here are some links to help you get started finding data for your geospatial projects
Spatial Data Repositories
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DataBasin: Lots of spatial data related to conservation issues across the US. The AdaptWest portal has tons of spatial data on climate change and its potential impacts.
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US Protected Areas Database: PAD-US is America’s official national inventory of U.S. terrestrial and marine protected areas that are dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity and to other natural, recreation and cultural uses, managed for these purposes through legal or other effective means. PAD-US also includes the best available aggregation of federal land and marine areas provided directly by managing agencies, coordinated through the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Federal Lands Working Group.
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USGS Gap Analysis Project: A variety of datasets depicting land cover and species distributions.
General Data Repositories
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Data is Plural newsletter: Jeremy Singer-Vine sends a weekly newsletter of the most interesting public datasets he’s found. You should subscribe to it. He also has an archive of all the datasets he’s highlighted.
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Google Dataset Search: Google indexes thousands of public datasets; search for them here.
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Kaggle: Kaggle hosts machine learning competitions where people compete to create the fastest, most efficient, most predictive algorithms. A byproduct of these competitions is a host of fascinating datasets that are generally free and open to the public. See, for example, the European Soccer Database, the Salem Witchcraft Dataset or results from an Oreo flavors taste test.
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360Giving: Dozens of British foundations follow a standard file format for sharing grant data and have made that data available online.
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US City Open Data Census: More than 100 US cities have committed to sharing dozens of types of data, including data about crime, budgets, campaign finance, lobbying, transit, and zoning. This site from the Sunlight Foundation and Code for America collects this data and rates cities by how well they’re doing.
Political science and economics datasets
There’s a wealth of data available for political science- and economics-related topics:
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François Briatte’s extensive curated lists: Includes data from/about intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), public opinion surveys, parliaments and legislatures, wars, human rights, elections, and municipalities.
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Thomas Leeper’s list of political science datasets: Good short list of useful datasets, divided by type of data (country-level data, survey data, social media data, event data, text data, etc.).
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Erik Gahner’s list of political science datasets: Huge list of useful datasets, divided by topic (governance, elections, policy, political elites, etc.)
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Inside AirBnB a Creative Commons-licensed dataset with a ton of spatially referenced info on AirBnBs in cities across the globe.
The #30daymapchallenge repositories
The #30daymapchallenge is a social mapping/cartography/data visualization challenge designed to encourage experimentation with different types of datasets and mapping approaches. Searching the hashtag on social media (especially Twitter) will bring up a bunch of cool examples. Here are a few repositories to help you get started:
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The Official #30DayMapChallenge Repo has an archive of past challenges and a description of what this is all about.
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Bob Rudis' 2019 bookdown project Contains both code and useful information for generating the visualizations along with sources for data.
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Alexandra Kapp’s 2020 repository makes use of some of the newer animation and interactive visualization techniques.