Finding data

The OldMapsOnline Portal was originally funded by the Joint Information Service Committee under Strand C: Clustering Digital Content of their Content Programme 2011-13. It is the successor of a project lead by the Moravian Library in the Czech Republic between 2008 and 2011. The portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world.

It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.

Natural Earth, built through a volunteer collaboration and supported by the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), was developed as a public domain resource for making custom maps and offers free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. 

It was created with the aims of:

1. Giving cartographers an off-the-shelf solution for creating small-scale world, regional, and country maps.
2. Including many features missing from people’s mental map of the world in the hope of improving overall geographic literacy.

Key features of Natural Earth include

• Vector features include name attributes and bounding box extent.
• Large polygons are split for more efficient data handling.
• Projection friendliness — vectors precisely match at 180 degrees longitude.
• Raster data includes grayscale-shaded relief and cross-blended hypsometric tints derived from the latest NASA SRTM Plus elevation data and tailored to register with Natural Earth Vector.

The GEO Data Portal provides access to data sets used by UNEP and its partners in the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report and other integrated environment assessments. Its online database holds more than 500 different variables, as national, subregional, regional and global statistics or as geospatial data sets (maps), covering themes like Freshwater, Population, Forests, Emissions, Climate, Disasters, Health and GDP. Variables can be displayed  as maps, graphs, data tables or downloaded in a variety of formats.

The NERC Environmental Data Portal allows you to search, combine and display environmental data from a wide range of providers. This portal uses the NERC Data Grid discovery services to locate data that can in turn be combined and visualised in an open geobrowser such as Google Earth or a web-based map client .

Hosted at the University of Edinburgh Gazetteer Scotland describres itself as "the first comprehensive gazetteer produced for Scotland since 1885. It includes tourist attractions, industries and historical sites, together with histories of family names and clans, biographies of famous Scots and descriptions of historical events associated with Scotland." Content can be searched and retrieved via 'Maps and Places' or via the 'History Time-Line' in addition to more conventional search and browse facilities.

The database contains data on the environment of Scotland. The topics covered include climate change, air and water quality, land use and wildlife. Where possible links are made to the website of the data providers. Links are also provided to other sources of environmental data on the Internet. Accompanying publications such as, Key Scottish Environment Statistics, (can be viewed as HTML or downloaded in Adobe PDF format)  which presents charts and summary data for topics including: Public Attitudes; Global Atmosphere; Water; Radioactivity; Waste; Wildlife, and Scottish Greenhouse Gas Emmissions can be downloaded from the Scottish Government website.

A source of historical climate data for the UK. Monthly summaries and UK/regional contoured maps for are available online. Historical weather station weather observation data and long-term statistical climate averages from 1961-2000 (station, district, regional) are also online in html format. Methods and Analysis links include a spatial analysis of trends in the UK cklimate since 1914 using gridded datasets in addition to monthly gridded data sets for a range of climatic variables over the UK  .

An interactive map which brings together information on key environmental schemes and designations, such as land classifications and rural designations. The project uses standard GIS tools to bring together information from DEFRA, the Countryside Agency, English Heritage, Natural England, the Environment Agency, the Forresty Commission and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. The Dataset Information and Download Facility allows for download searches by topic, dataset or organisation. A summary of the downloadable datasets is also available.

 This web site summarises the results of an ongoing study undertaken by AEA on behalf of the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Statistical Office of the European Communities ( SOEC, also referred to as Eurostat).  The reported outputs of the study are in PDF format and cover topics such as regional and national generation, energy mapping and renewable energy policies. There is also a set of external links to other renewable energy websites in addition to national and regional statistics, and annual renewables statistics, methodologies and energy trends.