ESRI's GIS Bibliography covers the literature of geographic information systems, science, and technology, indexing journals, conference proceedings, books, and reports from the origins of GIS to the present.
Cal-Atlas: A clearinghouse for California GIS data.
California Open Data Portal: A statewide data portal sponsored by the Government Operations Agency to host open data from across California government agencies.
Census Bureau: A principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy.
Digital Coast: A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-sponsored website focused on helping communities address coastal issues. Provides coastal data, training, and information. Content comes from many sources, all of which are vetted by NOAA.
Diva GIS: Provides free downloads of shapefiles for basic data including administrative boundaries, inland water, roads, and railroads. Downloads available by country.
Esri Open Data: Has more than 67,310 open data set from more than 4,000 organizations worldwide. Managed by the largest commercial GIS organization in the world. Download formats are in spreadsheet, KML, shapefile.
Geolode: A collaborative catalog of open geodata websites around the world.
Geospatial Data Gateway (NRCS - Natural Resources Conservation Service): Define a region and download recent imagery, census, and climate data (among others). Includes the National Agricultural Imagery Program Mosaic imagery.
Marine Cadastre: An integrated marine information system that provides data, tools, and technical support for ocean and Great Lakes planning. Developed through a partnership between the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office for Coastal Management and the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).
NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC): Retrieve global socioeconomic data from 15 different themes including agriculture, climate, conservation, governance, hazards, health, infrastructure, land use, marine and coastal, population, poverty, remote sensing, sustainability, and urban and water.
National MapViewer: Allows visualization and download of topographic base map data and other data themes including: Elevation, Orthoimagery, Land Cover, Hydrography, Geographic Names, Boundaries, Transportation, and Structures.
Natural Earth: a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. It includes both cultural and physical layers.
National historical geographic information systems (NHGIS): Provides aggregate census data and GIS-compatible boundary files for the United States between 1790 and 2000.
OpenStreetMap: Great source for street data and other infrastructure. Global coverage. Download OSM data directly through the map interface or other sources (including Geofabrik and the HOT (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team) export tool). OSM data may also be accessed via a QGIS plugin. OSM data is edited and updated by users, so it may be worth validating against current imagery in a GIS program.
Open Topography: A portal to LIDAR and high spatial resolution topographic data and tools.
USGS Earth Explorer: Access one of the largest databases of satellite and aerial imagery in the United States. Filter searches by time and sensors.
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Environmental Data Explorer: The authoritative source for data sets used by UNEP and its partners in the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report and other integrated environment assessments.
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