Data sources

Spatial data is available in a wide range of formats at the local, national, and international levels. Data is often published through larger data portals where you can find links to access data through a web service or options to download part of all of the data.

Local data sources for Baltimore and Maryland 🦀

• Baltimore City Open Data Hub

• Baltimore County GIS Open Data Portal

• BMC Regional GIS Data Center - Baltimore Metropolitan Council

• Chesapeake Bay Open Data Portal

• Maryland’s GIS Data Catalog

• Maryland Open Data

• Vital Signs Open Data Portal

• Maryland Food Systems Open Data Portal

National data sources for the U.S. 🇺🇸

• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Geospatial Data Storefront

• Geospatial at BTS (Bureau of Transportation Statistics), U.S. Department of Transportation

• BTS Data Inventory (Bureau of Transportation Statistics), U.S. Department of Transportation

• EDGE Geodata (Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates), U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics

• U.S. Geological Survey Science Data Catalog

• GeoPlatform.gov

• National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Data Portal

• Open Data Network (Socrata/Tyler Technologies)

• Urban Institute Data Catalog

Global data sources 🌏

• Natural Earth

• OpenStreetMap (see the OSM Wiki for more on how data is organized on OSM)

• ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World

• NASA Open Data Portal

• NOAA Data Discovery Portal

• World Bank Open Data

• Humanitarian Data Exchange

• Data Portals (Open Knowledge Foundation)

R packages for data access

General data access packages include:

• {esri2sf} 📦 to access ArcGIS FeatureServer data
• {RSocrata} to access Socrata data portals
• {ckanr} to access CKAN data portals

There are many different data access R packages for interacting with APIs and web services. A few broadly useful recommendations include:

• {rnaturalearth}: Get Natural Earth data.
• {tigris}: Download and use Census TIGER/Line shapefiles.
• {tidycensus}: Get US Census boundary and attribute data.
• {geodata}: Get climate, elevation, soil, crop, species occurrence, and administrative boundary data.
• {dataRetrieval}: Get USGS or EPA water quality sample data, streamflow data, and metadata directly from web services.
• {osmdata}: Get OpenStreetMap data.

I also maintain a few R packages for open data access in Baltimore and Maryland that students working on local projects may find helpful:

• {mapbaltimore}
• {mapmaryland}