The datasets the tutorials use, and places to look for more. Each sandbox's sources are footnoted on its own page.
Used in the tutorials
- 2015 Street Tree Census. NYC Parks, via NYC Open Data. About 666,000 trees, each visited by a volunteer. The tutorials use a subset for upper Manhattan as a CSV. Coordinates are WGS 84.
- 2010 Census Blocks. NYC Department of City Planning, via NYC Open Data. The tutorials use a subset as a GeoPackage.
CT2010is the tract,CB2010the block within it. - Land Cover 2010, 3 ft. Made from aerial imagery for the city; the full attribution is in the metadata on NYC Open Data, along with the data dictionary. EPSG:2263. The full raster is very large; Tutorial 2 uses a clip to the same area as the other two. [Clip download: TBD.]
Where to look
- NYC Open Data. Most of the data the sandboxes use comes from here. The API behind it can return an error message with a success status code, so open what you downloaded and check that it is data.
- NYC Department of City Planning: MapPLUTO, the 3D building model, zoning.
- Columbia Library Geodata Portal.
- US Census Bureau, and the TIGER/Line geographies.
- HUD for fair market rents and income limits, which the ADU sandbox uses.
- NOAA Tides and Currents for the water levels under the Sea Level Flood Map.
- A general rule of thumb for finding data: think about who would have the motivation (and the money/resources) to create the dataset you are looking for then try to research that entity.
Formats you'll meet
- Vector: shapefile (
.shpplus four or five sidecar files, keep them together), GeoJSON, GeoPackage (.gpkg, one file, preferred), a CSV with latitude and longitude columns. - Raster: GeoTIFF (
.tif), or the older.imgthe land cover comes as. One number per cell, a coordinate system, a cell size. - Coordinate reference systems: WGS 84 (
EPSG:4326) for anything with latitude and longitude; New York State Plane, Long Island (EPSG:2263, feet) for local maps of the city. Check which one a dataset uses before you draw it.