ECON 3039: Environmental and Natural Resource Economics Data Sources

Search for open data sets shared by ArcGIS users.

The Climate Data Guide (or "Guide") is an expert knowledge portal providing concise and reliable information on the strengths and limitations of the climate data that are essential for measuring and predicting physical climate risk. The Guide publishes data summaries with access links, intercomparisons, and expert commentaries on the utility of climate data for addressing a wide variety of questions in climate science.

Browse data sets by topic, or search the data catalog. You can limit your results to geospatial data sets. Federal and non-federal (state, county, municipal, etc.) data sources are available.

The Spatial Data Repository provides geographically-linked health and demographic data from the DHS Program.

EarthStat.org serves geographic data sets with the purpose of solving the grand challenge of feeding a growing global population while reducing agriculture’s impact on the environment. EarthStat is a collaboration between the Global Landscapes Initiative at The University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Ramankutty Lab at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

EPA's official open data catalog

From the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, FAOSTAT is an on-line and multilingual database currently containing over 1 million time-series records covering international statistics in the following areas: production, trade, food balance sheets, food aid shipments, fertilizer and pesticides, land use and irrigation, forest products, fishery products, population, agricultural machinery.

GBIF—the Global Biodiversity Information Facility—is an international network and research infrastructure funded by the world’s governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth. Coordinated through its Secretariat in Copenhagen, the GBIF network of participating countries and organizations, working through participant nodes, provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards and open-source tools that enable them to share information about where and when species have been recorded. This knowledge derives from many sources, including everything from museum specimens collected in the 18th and 19th century to geotagged smartphone photos shared by amateur naturalists in recent days and weeks.

Global Forest Watch is an interactive online platform that offers a variety of data and tools to help you monitor forests.

The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is an open platform for sharing data, launched in July 2014. A team within the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) manages HDX. OCHA is part of the United Nations Secretariat, responsible for bringing together humanitarian actors to ensure a coherent response to emergencies.

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is responsible for preserving, monitoring, assessing, and providing public access to the Nation's treasure of climate and historical weather data and information.

The petroleum datasets contain information on all known oil and gas deposits throughout the world. Two datasets are available: one for on-shore deposits and anonther one for off-shore deposits. Given the geological characteristics of petroleum, the data are stored as polygons in shapefile (GIS) format. In addition, basic data on each deposit are available as spreadsheets (Excel). Here, spatial information is limited to latitude and longitude coordinates for the centerpoint of each deposit (polygon).
Aside from exact locational information, each deposit are registered with type of resource (oil and/or gas), discovery- and production dates (whenever known), name of petroleum basin, geographic coordinates of polygon centroid, and primary source of information.

Protected Planet is the most up to date and complete source of information on protected areas, updated monthly with submissions from governments, non-governmental organizations, landowners and communities. It is managed by the United Nations Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) with support from IUCN and its World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA).

The UN Environment Open Data portal allows users to search information by thematic area, donor, geographic location, project status (ongoing/completed), or obtain an overview of project funding. The projects under the PIMS category currently comprise projects that were approved or revised as from January 2017.

A geospatial dataset representing local- and regional-scale aquifer system boundaries

The Census of Agriculture is a complete count of U.S. farms and ranches and the people who operate them. Even small plots of land - whether rural or urban - growing fruit, vegetables or some food animals count if $1,000 or more of such products were raised and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the Census year. The Census of Agriculture, taken only once every five years, looks at land use and ownership, operator characteristics, production practices, income and expenditures.

Indicators are arranged by topics such as agriculture, climate change, energy & mining, environment, etc. Once you've clicked on an indicator, look for the download button to acquire the data for all countries & years available.

WWF freely shares several of their data sets including Marine Ecoregions of the World, Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World, HydroSHEDS, Global 200 (identifies a set of the Earth's terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecoregions that harbor exceptional biodiversity and are representative of its ecosystems), Global Lakes and Wetlands Database, Smart Infrastructure Planner, Tiger Conservation Landscape, and World Grassland Types.