geoBoundaries

The world's largest open, free and research-ready database of political administrative boundaries.

Produced and maintained by the William & Mary geoLab and open data community since 2017, the geoBoundaries Global Database of Political Administrative Boundaries Database is an online, open license resource of boundaries (i.e., state, county) for every country in the world. We currently track approximately 1 million boundaries within over 200 entities, including all 195 UN member states. All boundaries are available to view or download in common file formats, including shapefiles; the only requirement for use is acknowledgement.

Why do we produce geoBoundaries?

Transparency & Research Replication

While many countries provide public domain information on where their boundaries are, a majority do not provide an authoritative, open digital source. We strongly believe that every global citizen should have access to information about the legal political boundaries they live within, without having to pay for the access.

Precision & Consistency Matter

Small shifts in legal boundaries can drive huge changes, but are rarely tracked or recognized. We collate or create the highest geographic precision open data possible to promote precise results, and keep all of our previous versions available online. geoBoundaries has been around since 2017, providing annual updates each year.

Ease of Use

Every one of our boundaries is available as a Shapefile and geoJSON, with globally unique identifiers and consistent attributes. We provide both manual download and API access to support most users preferred mode of access.

Peer Review & Community Contributions

Anyone can participate in conversations about - or contribute to - geoBoundaries by visiting our public repository. You can also learn more about the procedures used to build geoBoundaries by reading our peer reviewed (PLoS One) publication.

Download geoBoundaries

Acknowledgement is required for use of these products. Users should be aware of the following usage notes:

We seek to represent countries as they would represent themselves in the case of conflicted boundaries. This can result in overlaps between countries. If you need a single, seamless global boundary, please consider our CGAZ dataset.
Each boundary is the most recent, most accurate open license product we could create or retrieve from sources with clearly defined licenses.
In addition to the open geoBoundaries data, we also offer UN OCHA CODs (Humanitarian) and UN SALB (Authoritative) data, where available, standardized to an identical schema.
The data available on this website are the most recent available. If you require a versioned release (i.e., for research replication), please visit our historic releases page, or use one of our versioned APIs.

How to Use

Any uses of geoBoundaries must come with an acknowledgement - we really need it!

We require an acknowledgement in any products you produce which use this data. The geoBoundaries team is primarily judged on it's citations: it is how our users, funders and peers track our progress and impact. In most uses, you should cite two sources: geoBoundaries, and the underlying source we provide in the metadata for a given file.

Academic Cite
Website
Leaflet

For academic papers that use geoBoundaries in analysis, we ask that you cite our PLoS One Publication. We recommend the below citations, but feel free to adapt to your own citation style.

Runfola, Daniel, Austin Anderson, Heather Baier, Matt Crittenden, Elizabeth Dowker, Sydney Fuhrig, Seth Goodman, Grace Grimsley, Rachel Layko, Graham Melville, Maddy Mulder, Rachel Oberman, Joshua Panganiban, Andrew Peck, Leigh Seitz, Sylvia Shea, Hannah Slevin, Rebecca Yougerman, Lauren Hobbs. "geoBoundaries: A global database of political administrative boundaries." Plos one 15, no. 4 (2020): e0231866.

You can also use our short-form citation:

Runfola D, Anderson A, Baier H, Crittenden M, Dowker E, Fuhrig S, et al. (2020) geoBoundaries: A global database of political administrative boundaries. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0231866. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231866

When using geoBoundaries on the web, we ask that you put the name "geoBoundaries" with a link back to this website, www.geoboundaries.org, somewhere prominent on the page that uses the boundaries. This can be a stand-alone link or within a sentence. For example, any of the below would be acceptable:

Using the <a href= 'https://www.geoboundaries.org'>geoBoundaries</a> database, we constructed a time-series illustrating how under 5 child mortality has shifted over time.

Administrative boundaries courtesy of <a href= 'https://www.geoboundaries.org'>geoBoundaries</a>

<a href= 'https://www.geoboundaries.org'>geoBoundaries</a>

When using geoBoundaries on a map produced by leaflet, we ask that you add a link to geoBoundaries in the leaflet attributes. For example:

var map = L.map('map').setView([51.505, -0.09], 13);
L.tileLayer(
	'http://{s}.tile.osm.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png',
	{attribution: 
	'<a href="www.geoboundaries.org">geoBoundaries</a>'}
	).addTo(map);

For convenience, you can also view a simple example.