Global Administrative Areas

GADM is a spatial database of the location of the world's administrative areas (or adminstrative boundaries) for use in GIS and similar software. Administrative areas in this database are countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, bibhag, bundeslander, daerah istimewa, fivondronana, krong, landsvæðun, opština, sous-préfectures, counties, and thana. GADM describes where these administrative areas are (the "spatial features"), and for each area it provides some attributes, foremost being the name and variant names.

The current version is 1.0

The data are available as shapefile, ESRI geodatabase, RData, and Google Earth kmz format. Shapefiles can be used for most mapping and "GIS" software (you can download a free program such as Q-GIS or DIVA-GIS. The RData files can be used in R with the 'sp' package loaded.

Here is more information on formats and their limitations.

You can download country level files (recommended) or files covering the entire world

Our goal is to map all administrative areas of all countries, at all levels, at any time period. We use a high spatial resolution, and of a extensive set of attributes for each spatial feature. This is a never ending project, but we are happy to share what we have so far. The current version of GADM maps 226,439 administrative areas (or 167,176 if you count only the lowest level for each country). You can see them on these maps.

Our intention is to transform this project into a global collaborative effort. We still need to work out the best way of organizing this. But please contribute in whatever way you can by sending us a message to point out errors, or even better, to send an improved file for a country of your interest.

Here are links to administrative area data and information from other sources.