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Common boundary types that can be found online and used with Population Explorer:
- Administrative Areas
- Building Footprints
- City Blocks
- Communities
- Districts
- Earthquake Intensity Boundaries
- Extreme Weather Warnings
- Flood Warning Zones
- Marker files
- Neighborhoods
- Wildfire Boundaries
- Zip Codes
Our favorite open-source data websites
Below we share some of our favorite open-source data websites so you can effectively take your population analysis to a more critical level:
- USGS Earth Explorer -Remote sensing data- satellite images, aerial photographs, and cartographic products
- ESRI Open Data - Social, economic, political, environmental data. Worldwide organizations sharing data = 5637; total data sets =103,921(updated 8/2018)
- Natural Earth Data - Global cultural and physical vector GIS datasets
- NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center - Socioeconomic data (agriculture, climate, conservation, governance, hazards, health, infrastructure, land use, marine and coastal, population, poverty, remote sensing, sustainability, urban and water)
- US Census Bureau - U.S. socio-economic, population, and demographic data
- Open Topography - Community-based high-resolution topography data
- UNEP Environmental Data Explorer - Freshwater, population, forests, emissions, climate, disasters, health and GDP spatial and non-spatial data
- GeoNetwork - Agriculture, fisheries, land resource GIS data
- NCAR - Climate data
- European Environmental Agency - Datasets from the European Environment Agency - physical geography and environmental assets
A Quick Word About Shapefiles:
Simply put, a shapefile (also known as a boundary) is a data layer with attribute information associated with a specific geographic location and dataset. Shapefiles are created with spatial features including points, lines, or polygons (areas). In Population Explorer, when a shapefile layer is added to the map, the user can then view demographic and population data associated with that particular geometric feature.
Population Explorer accepts a range of shapefile formats including KML/KMZ. You can find more information about shapefile formats here: (Shapefile Formats).
Additional PopEx Resources
Examples
Hurricane Harvey impact zone, Houston USA 2017
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Intensity rings from 7.1 magnitude earthquake, Mexico 2018
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