Geographical data¶

Names (added by Jim)¶

• geonames.org
  • "The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge"
  • Have to pay for their "premium" database
  • *Many sources*
• NGA GEOnet Names Server
  • "the official repository of standard spellings of all foreign place names, sanctioned by the United States Board on Geographic Names. The database also contains variant spellings (cross-references), which are useful for finding purposes."
  • Text-based GeoNames search
• Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online
  • FAQ
• Yahoo GeoPlanet
• Yahoo! Placemaker
  • Guide
• Python geodict
  • "A simple Python library/command-line tool for pulling location information from unstructured text"
• Unlock text
  • "Unlock text provides a "geo-parsing" which extracts references to locations from text or XML metadata and gives a best guess as to their coordinate locations. Unlock Text can be used with either the open or restricted gazetteers to suggest locations for place-names."
• MaxMind World Cities with Population

Administrative boundaries (added by Jim)¶

• GADM Version 2.0
• Natural Earth administrative layers (levels 0 and 1)
• World borders shapefile

Environmental data¶

• ENO: Environment Online: supposedly has environmental raster data, but couldn't find it

Climate data¶

• GISTEMP: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
• NNDC Climate Data Online
• GPCP: Global Precipitation Climatology Project
• KNB: The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity
  • supposedly has "Biomass, Carbon, Chlorophyll, GIS, Nitrate, Nutrients, Precipitation, Temperature, Radiation, Weather", but these fields do not seem to appear in the dataset metadata