Geospatial Data: Administrative Boundaries

This website contains the boundary files for the provinces and territories, federal electoral districts, and other geographic divisions in Canada. There are two types of boundary files in shapefile format found on this website: cartographic and digital. Cartographic boundary files portray the geographic areas using only the major land mass of Canada and its coastal islands. Digital boundary files portray the full extent of the geographic areas, including the coastal water area.

Using Scholars Geoportal, you can view and download numerous administrative boundary files that cover Canada. To retrieve a list of administrative boundary datasets, browse the subject category Administrative and Census Boundaries. Please note that the Scholars Geoportal is only available to members of the York University community.

The administrative features of the CanVec series include geopolitical regions (international, territorial and provincial) and populated place names.

Natural Earth is a resource for making custom maps. Data include administrative boundaries, parks and protected areas, populated places, hydrology, and bathymetry in vector format. There is also raster data for land cover, shaded relief, ocean water, and drainages with lakes.

Download country level data for any country in the world: administrative boundaries, roads, railroads, altitude, land cover, population density. This website is maintained by DIVA GIS and distributes data from reliable sources.

Natural Earth is a resource for making custom maps. Data include administrative boundaries, parks and protected areas, populated places, hydrology, and bathymetry in vector format. There is also raster data for land cover, shaded relief, ocean water, and drainages with lakes.

GIS boundary files at several administrative levels: national boundaries, first level administrative units, and second level administrative units. These data files can be used with IPUMS data.

The TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) data contains features such as roads, railroads, rivers, as well as legal and statistical geographic areas of United States. This website provides several methods of accessing the data.

"World Administrative Divisions is a detailed dataset of country first level administrative boundaries which can be used at both large and small scales. It has been designed to be used as a basemap that can be easily edited to fit a users needs and view of the political world. Included are attributes for name and ISO codes, along with notes identifying disputed boundaries and continent information." Please note that this data is in a layer format for ArcGIS, but it can converted to shapefile format, once in ArcGIS. A free ArcGIS Online account is needed to access.

"World Countries is a detailed layer of country level boundaries which is best used at large scales." Please note that this data is in a layer format for ArcGIS, but it can converted to shapefile format, once in ArcGIS. A free ArcGIS Online account is needed to access.

"World Water Bodies represents the open water rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans of the world." Please note that this data is in a layer format for ArcGIS, but it can be converted to shapefile format, once in ArcGIS.