The Berkeley/Penn Urban and Environmental Modeler’s Datakit consists of a series of viewable and downloadable ESRI shapefiles and grids describing many of the physical, administrative, transportation, demographic, economic, land use and land cover, and environmental characteristics of the 48 contiguous United States. This website and the accompanying data were constructed as part of the URBAN & ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT 2050 PROJECT at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD) at the University of California, Berkeley under a grant from the National Science Foundation.  

These data are provided free of charge to all interested parties. The data were obtained from a variety of federal public domain sources, including the U.S. Geologic Survey, the Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  

Available layers include:  
•    Municipal, county, metropolitan area, and state boundaries
•    Census block and census tract boundaries and selected attributes, including net housing and population    densities.
•    Highway, railroad, and urban rail transit networks; and air and seaport locations
•    Locations of major employment centers and employment data for 1994 and 2003.
•    Measures of 30- and 45-minute job accessibility for every location in the U.S.
•    Boundaries of all federal lands, including national parks and monuments, national forests, Bureau of Land Management lands, and military facilities.
•    Elevation and slope data generated from the National Elevation Dataset (NED).
•    Comprehensive land cover data for 1992 and 2001 from the U.S. Geological Survey, including agriculture, forest, pasture, urban, and wetland locations.
•    Locations of all major water bodies including rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs.
•    Locations of lacaustrine, palustrine, and riverine wetlands from the National Wetlands Inventory.

The data are distributed as a series of individual layers in zipped shapefile or grid format. All layers are projected to a Lambert’s Conformal Conic NAD83 projection system.  Users should click on the .html Metadata listing associated with each layer for more detailed information including date of issuance, a list of attribute data values, projection details, and additional data provided by the researchers. Users may preview each layer in map form by clicking on the .pdf Preview Map listing.

Once downloaded and unzipped, the data layers may be read directly into ArcMap, ArcView, ArcGIS, or any other GIS program that reads ESRI shapefiles and grids.  Although each layer is independently projected, to insure spatial consistency, users are advised to first download and add the basemap layer containing the outline of the 48 contiguous United States.

These data layers are being used by the Urban & Environmental Footprint 2050 research team to build a forecasting model of the spatial distribution and density of population and economic activity for the 48 contiguous United States for the year 2050; and to use the model to test the implications of alternative planning and conservation scenarios.  It is our hope that students, faculty, researchers, and policy analysts will find these data useful for their own purposes of spatial exploration, analysis, modeling and forecasting.  We ask only that you credit the Berkeley/Penn Urban & Environmental Footprint 2050 Project when including the data in published results.

It is our hope to augment currently available layers with new and additional data as they become available.  If you have additional spatial data covering the 48-state study area that you would like to share with fellow researchers through this website, please e-mail John Landis: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Click here to access Shapefile data.
Click here to access Raster data.
Click here to find out more about the Urban and Environmental Footprint 2050 Project, and to access project publications.