Gathering Data

So where do you find spatial data? Maybe you already have some, maybe you’re still searching. A lot of spatial data is accessible via the internet, albeit under different licenses.

Libraries, Municipal portals, and Governmental agencies

Outside of this workshop, you might begin your search on UBC Library’s GIS website. If you are a UBC student, staff, or faculty, you’ll also have access to the Abacus Data Network which contains lots of data, including historical datasets. Municipal and governmental agencies local to your project are also great places to begin looking. For example, see for Vancouver the Vancouver Open Data Portal, Data BC for Provincial data, and Natural Resources Canada for national resource data. Many Canadian cities have their own municipal open data source, though downloading the data will be different depending on the platform used by each city (see our workshop on Tools and Workflows for guidance).

Free and open source context layers

Natural Earth, which we will use today, provides free, public domain raster and vector data at a global scale. For example, you can download country and state outlines (and from various state-based perspectives), rivers/lakes/reservoirs, oceans and coastlines, and landmasses. You can also download hillshade data from Natural Earth whose symbology you can adjust in QGIS to show topography. This makes it an excellent resource for simple reference mapping for academic publication.

World (historical) data

The Humanitarian Data Exchange contains lots of useful global data. WorldClim publishes historical climate data such as precipitation and temperature, which you can download as raster datasets. For free and open-source infrastructural data, see Open Street Maps (OSM). Refer to our Plugins in QGIS Workshop for a demonstration of how to extract and download OSM data or use it as a basemap for your maps.

Satellite Imagery

Satellite imagery can often be downloaded directly from providers. For example, download Sentinel data from the Copernicus Browser. If you’re using QGIS, the SRTM-Downloader plugin is a handy tool to download NASA data for a specific area of interest directly from within your GIS interface. If you are a UBC student, staff, or faculty, you can request a Planet account to gain access to much more imagery. Refer to our Project Design workshop and resource for important considerations as you search, download, store, and use data.

Creating your own

Finally, you can always create your own vector layers, or create new shapefiles within a GIS by tracing existing data. If you are working with historical or physical maps and want to digitize them or otherwise create spatial data using them as template, see our workshop on georeferencing or our georeferencing resource page.

For today’s workshop…

Today’s workshop will use vector data data from Natural Earth, Statistics Canada, and Native Land Digital. The workshop folder contains some of this data, as well as additional datasets for you to practice thematic mapping. However, because finding, downloading, and preparing spatial data is a major part of mapping for academic publication, you will be guided through downloading the main datasets for today’s workshop on your own. Remember, move each dataset you download to the workshop folder and unzip it there.

Data needed

Canadian provincial & territorial boundaries
World countries, lakes, and oceans

To Do

1. Download Canadian provincial boundaries from Statistics Canada
For this workshop, we’ll use the dataset from 2016 because it downloads the fastest. Navigate to the following link: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a883eb14-0c0e-45c4-b8c4-b54c4a819edb. You will see many file options. Download the very first one by clicking Go to resource.

province download

This will take a minute or so to download, so while you’re waiting, move on to downloading the next dataset.

2. Download Natural Earth Data
Navigate to www.naturalearthdata.com. Go to Downloads.

You have the option to download large scale, medium scale, and small scale data. Large scale will give you the most detail, and therefore be a heftier file. Because our Natural Earth data will be used as context for surrounding countries only, we actually prefer a less detailed, smaller scale outline. So, let’s download vector data at the medium scale. We will download 3 files: Countries, Ocean, and Lakes+Reservoirs. Countries will be under “Cultural” and Ocean and Lakes under “Physical”.

Remember to move all downloads to your workshop data folder and unzip them there.

Data Provided

Some data is provided already for you.

Inside the workshop data folder you’ll see a subfolder called thematic-mapping. This contains data on chestnut street trees of Vancouver, downloaded from Vancouver’s open data portal and modified slightly to make them ready for mapping. You are welcome to use these layers to practice thematic mapping.
Indigenous territories from Native Land Digital API. This data was downloaded for the entire Earth in .geojson format. While the file is provided for you in the workshop data folder, you can practice downloading it yourself after this workshop by either signing up for your own API key, or using AADlPNbKCBAepz816odRT (my key) and following the instructions here.

Take a moment to explore native-land.ca so that you can visualize the Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties in your area. Below is an interactive snapshot of where we are. Explore the full globe map here. On the left, you can search by territories, languages, and/or treaties. At the bottom right, you can choose to show or hide colonial boundaries, roads, and namings. You can also increase the text size and save/download your current view as an image.