Global Administrative Areas (version 0.9)
GADM is a database of the location of the world's administrative areas (boundaries). Administrative areas in this database are countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, bibhag, bundeslander, daerah istimewa, fivondronana, krong, landsvæðun, opština, sous-préfecture, counties, and thana. GADM describes where these administrative areas are (the "spatial features"), and for each area it provides some attributes, foremost being the name and in some cases variant names. The data are in ESRI shapefile and geodatabase format. Shapefiles can be used in, or imported into, most mapping and spatial data analysis programs (GIS). If you do not have such software you can download DIVA-GIS or other free software
GADM was developed to fulfill several needs, including georeferencing of textual locality descriptions and mapping census data (the BioGeomancer project). We attempt to add the location of the administrative areas of all countries, at all levels, and including administrative areas that are no longer in use. We also put much emphasis on high spatial resolution, and of a extensive set of attributes for each spatial feature. This is a never ending project, and there is a lot that still needs to be done. But we are happy to share what we have accomplished so far. The current version of GADM maps 116,996 administrative boundaries. For more statistics see the summary statistics page, or look at this map (high resolution version).
You can download as a shapefile or ESRI geodatabase (ArcMap 9.2). Note that many of the non standard latin (roman / english) characters are lost in the shapefile (because of limitations of the dbf attributes file). Even if you use the shapefile for mapping, you can use the 'gadm' table in the geodatabase for the correct attributes (the geodatabase is a MS Access database that can be accessed via ODBC). Also note that in the geodatabase there is a table called "att_0", with the attributes of level zero (i.e. countries). This table first step towards making this a more relational database. It has information (including the beginning of a documentation of the source of some of these data (more here)).
Please note that in GADM, a "country" is any entity with an ISO country code. Frequently these are not sovereign states. For example Greenland is an "ISO-country", and so are the Faroe Islands, and so is Denmark. Together these three ISO-countries form the Kingdom of Denmark, a single state (or country - but not for GADM). Worse still is that the world continues to have many disputes about the sovereignty over areas. We do not wish to express any opinion about such matters and we try to map the de-facto situation.
Here is a map of all countries and their bounding boxes (when using a lat/long "projection"), highlighting those countries that cross the international date line, and for which these bounding boxes make little sense (this map is provided for diversion only).
Our intention is to transform this project into a global collaborative effort. We still need to work out the best way of organizing this. But please contribute in whatever way you can by sending us email pointing out errors, or even better, an improved file for a country of your interest.
Here are administrative areas from other sources, and some other data layers.
The development of GADM was partly supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore foundation for the BioGeoMancer project. The work was done at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and the International Rice Research Institute by Robert Hijmans, Nell Garcia, Julian Kapoor, Arnel Rala, Aileen Maunahan, and John Wieczorek.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Note: this only covers our contribution, not that of others (data provided to us). Data for some countries is more restricted, see the "geodatabase", table "att_0" for details; but also note that documentation is as yet incomplete.
