- Borrowing
Data is a fundamental resource for students studying geography and the environment. It provides the quantitative and qualitative information needed to analyze geographical patterns, relationships, and trends. Whether you are researching urban planning, environmental management, climate studies, or other areas within geography, accessing reliable data is crucial for your research.
For human geography students, data can be particularly useful for examining population demographics, economic activities, social issues, and cultural patterns. You might look for datasets that include census information, economic statistics, social surveys, and land use data.
For physical geography students, data is essential for studying natural processes and features. You can find climate data, geological surveys, hydrological measurements, and biodiversity records. These datasets will help you analyze weather patterns, geological formations, water resources, and ecological systems.
Free/Cheap Data Visualization Tools:
Datawrapper, Tableau Public, Google Fusion Tables
Open data portals from the following municipal governments where raw data on a variety of subjects is made available for free:
They can be browsed by subject or searched by keyword. Most datasets come with a description of what the data contains and how often it’s updated. When you find a dataset you’re interested in, be sure to make note of the specific URL where it’s located so you can find it again if you need to.
The BC Open Infrastructure Data Master List contains a list of municipal open data portals in British Columbia, Canada. Each of the open data portals has been reviewed for data sets related to municipal infrastructure, including drainage, water, sanitary and transportation related map layers.
For agencies without open data portals, you can use Google advanced search to look for spreadsheets on a specific site (ie. site:dnv.org filetype:xlsx) or its experimental “Table Search” (research.google.com/tables) to look for data in web tables. If searching for spreadsheets, be sure to do two searches: one for filetype:xls and one for filetype:xlsx
Attribution: Chad Skelton's Handout: SLA Presentation November 24, 2015
The B.C. Data Catalogue hosts data from B.C. government ministries and public sector agencies. It contains thousands of datasets, many free for anyone to use under the Open Government Licence. These datasets represent a wide range of information, including:
You can search the BC Data Catalogue using keywords or acronyms. Enter your search terms on the main landing page, dataset list page, or use the magnifier icon on the page header.
The BCER GIS Open Data Portal contains energy related spatial data for B.C.
The Canadian Open Government Portal hosts information resources and data sets published by Canadian government institutions.
The Canadian Open Data and Free Geospatial Data Resources contains links to Canadian Open Data (sites that offer data downloads at no cost and without restrictions), free geospatial data, online web mapping applications and other sources of geospatial information (including National, Provincial and Municipal levels).
As of 2012, Statistics Canada adopted a new policy that made almost all of the data products on its website free.
They have a special site specifically for Geography Data that has map data, analysis and reference resources for specific regions or areas.
When looking at a data table on the StatsCan site, look for the “Download” tab. From here, you can usually download simple spreadsheets as CSV or tab-delimited files. For larger datasets, download the IVT file, which you can open in StatsCan’s free “Beyond 20/20” program. From Beyond 20/20, you can then export smaller slices of the data as Excel or CSV files. Summary tables don’t have a “download” link but will often have a link to the underlying CANSIM table at the bottom.
1,607,000 datasets from 36 countries
Brings together data published by UK central government, local authorities and public bodies.
The United States Government’s open data site is designed to unleash the power of government open data to inform decisions by the public and policymakers, drive innovation and economic activity, achieve agency missions, and strengthen the foundation of an open and transparent government.
Free and open access to data about development in countries around the globe.
Elections BC and Elections Canada make detailed election results available in spreadsheet format along with “shapefiles” which detail both the boundaries of ridings and the boundaries of polling areas within those ridings.
This data will allow you to analyze election results and create colour-coded election maps.
Elections BC also makes its campaign contribution data available for download as a single file.
