Research Guides: ENTS 120: Introduction to Geospatial Analysis: Explore by Format (GIS)

Locations of Data in GIS Format

See also the "Explore by Place" tab, for guidance on finding GIS open data portals or repositories for specific locations.

The following resources are designed to help you find data that is specifically formatted for use in GIS software. By definition, then, everything you find here will be spatial data. Most of these have a very wide scope and are designed to help you find all available data within that scope.

Living Atlas of the World - ESRI
A curated collection of GIS datasets, maps, apps, and data layers. Living Atlas is a great first place to look for data because you can be sure the datasets are of high quality. However, the collection is relatively small (less than 20,000 datasets), so you may need to try other collections, too.
ArcGIS.com Data Search
A large repository of data uploaded by ArcGIS community users. Be sure to pay attention to authorship and read metadata because quality varies!
ArcGIS Hub
Open GIS datasets shared by organizations who want to make their data freely available.
Finding GIS Data - Carleton Geospatial Lab
A very helpful guide to finding GIS data from the Carleton Geospatial Lab
Carleton GIS Data
Datasets created by the Carleton GIS Lab, campus academic departments, student projects and other collections.