The Global Administrative Areas (GADM) 3.6 vector dataset series is the world coverage for administrative units at different administrative levels. Delimiting a total of 386,735 boundaries, GADM open data project delivers distinct datasets representing administrative boundaries for each country and its respective political subdivisions. The dataset series is comprised of the six administrative levels global datasets for: National (level 0), State/province/equivalent (level 1), County/district/equivalent (level 2), Commune/municipality/equivalent (level 3) and smaller Levels 4 and 5. Attributes for Level 0 comprise country name in English and ISO 3166-1 alpha3 coding. Administrative units associated with attribute information include official names in Latin and non-Latin scripts, variant names, administrative type in local and English.
Administrative Level 4 is available for 20 countries and Level 5 for France and Rwanda.
Supplemental Information:
The dataset was originally produced for the BioGeomancer project, with collaboration from the International Rice Research Institute and of California, Berkeley, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
The development of GADM was partly supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore foundation for the BioGeomancer project.
Contact points:
Resource Contact: Robert Hijmans (Graduate Group Chair & Professor)
Data lineage:
GADM unique ID (GID) starts with the three-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code. If there are subdivisions these are identified by a number from 1 to n, where n is the number of subdivisions at level 1. This value is concatenated with the country code, using a dot to delimit the two. For example, AFG.1, AFG.2, ..., AFG.n. If there are second-level subdivisions, numeric codes are assigned within each first-level subdivision and these are concatenated with the first level identifier, using a dot as a delimiter. For example, AFG.1.1, AFG.1.2, AFG.1.3, ..., and AFG.2.1, AFG.2.2, .... And so forth for the third, fourth, and fifth levels. Finally, there is an underscore followed by a version number appended to the code. For example, AFG.3_1 and AFG.3.2_1. The GID codes are persistent after version 3.6 (there were errors in the codes in version 3.4). If an area changes, for example, if it splits into two new areas, two new codes will be assigned, and the old code will not be used anymore. The version only changes when there is a major overhaul of the divisions in a country, for example when a whole new set of subdivisions is introduced.
Resource constraints:
The data are freely available for academic use and other non-commercial use. Redistribution, or commercial use is not allowed without prior permission. See the license for more details.
Online resources:
GADM Historical Data Download
GADM Dataset Download
