DIVA-GIS || An Open Free GIS Data Portal

Written by: Nurullah Opu

DIVA-GIS is a free computer program for mapping and geographic data analysis (a geographic information system. With DIVA-GIS you can make maps of the World, or of a very small area, using, for example, state boundaries, rivers, a satellite image, and the locations of sites where an animal species was observed. 

You can download the program and read the documentation.

They also provide free spatial data for the whole World that you can use in DIVA-GIS or other programs.

Data Sets Present in the Portal

• Global climate data (WorldClim)
• Species occurrence data (GBIF, HerpNET, MaNIS, OBIS, ORNIS, REMIB)
• Crop (genebank) collection data (GENESYS)
• Near global 90 meter resolution elevation data
• High resolution satellite images (LandSat)

Download Portal

About Data

Subject	Description	Source	Format	Resolution
Administrative areas (boundaries)	Country outlines and administrative subdivisions for all countries. The level of subdivision varies between countries	GADM, version 1.0	Vector (area)	-
Inland water	Rivers, canals, and lakes. Seperate files for line and area features	Digital Chart of the World	Vector (line and area)	-
Roads	Roads	Digital Chart of the World	Vector (line)	-
Railroads	Railroads	Digital Chart of the World	Vector (line)	-
Elevation	SRTM30 dataset. CGIAR-SRTM data aggregated to 30 seconds	CGIAR SRTM (3 seconds resolution)	Grid	30 seconds
Land cover	Land cover, original data resampled onto a 30 seconds grid	GLC2000	Grid	30 seconds
Population	Population density (old)	CIESIN, 2000. Global gridded population database	Grid	30 seconds
Climate	Monthly climate data	WorldClim	Grid	30 seconds
Gazetteer	A gazetteer is a list of place names and their coordinates. The files you can download here are for use in DIVA for automatic georeferencing (to assign coordinates to places). The files should be placed in the \gazet directory. (old, useBiogeomancer). They can also be used to map localities, however you can download more recent files from NIMA	U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency's (NIMA) database offoreign geographic feature names	DBF	-

DIVA-GIS is particularly useful for mapping and analyzing biodiversity data, such as the distribution of species, or other 'point-distributions'. It reads and write standard data formats such as ESRI shapefiles, so interoperability is not a problem. DIVA-GIS runs on Windows only.

You can use the program to analyze data, for example by making grid (raster) maps of the distribution of biological diversity, to find areas that have high, low, or complementary levels of diversity. And you can also map and query climate data. You can predict species distributions using the BIOCLIM or DOMAIN models.

References:

http://www.diva-gis.org/

http://geoplaza.vu.nl/data/dataset

SHARES

Share

Pin it

Tweet

Share

Share

Share

Buffer

Print

About Nurullah Opu

Imagine a workaholic, a curious person and a perfectionist, and the combination of three defines me how I am. Being born in the old skirt of Dhaka city, Bangladesh. I was raised in a competitive, practical life which has shaped me what I am today. Master's student, in University of Dhaka, one of the oldest, top ranked public university in Bangladesh. Majoring in Physical Geography and Environment, I see myself as a future data analyst having expertise in geo-spatial technology. So, from student life, I have practiced and earned handful experiences on spatial technology. ArcGIS Desktop, QGIS, Erdas Imagine, ENVI, ILWIS and SPSS are my preferred software to work on. Experiences on GIS programming with Python, Leaflet and Development in some ArcGIS platforms and also creating websites and blogs with great UX and UI design. My designs to be checked on the portfolio and blog section of my personal website (www.nurullahopu.ml). Reach out if you'd like contact me for any queries.