Free GIS Datasets

Extracted from his own website, please follow the links...

As a PhD student working in Remote Sensing and GIS, I have spent a lot of time looking for free datasets that I can use in my research. All of the datasets below are free to use for academic and non-profit work, and don't require any special academic registration, although most of them ask you to cite their papers/website. Some datasets will be free to use for commercial work too - please check the terms of use on each dataset's website.
A number of these datasets are sources that I have used or various projects, but others are ones that I have found linked to on the internet. I'm hoping that I will gradually be able to add more datasets to this list as people tell me about them. If you want to let me know about some other free datasets which I might want to add then please email me at gisdata@rtwilson.com.
Some of the datasets listed on this site came from suggestions by members of the GIS group on LinkedIn - thanks everyone. Also, a few of the sites below are not in English - for these sites I have trusted either the descriptions given by the people who suggested them to me or a poor quality translation from Google Translate. If you're interested in this page you may also be interested in my academic website and my blog, particularly my review of Eric Westra's Python Geospatial Development book.