Data to explore
Start with the map data you already have, then try some of the best free public datasets. Each one opens in NimbleMap, and each comes with a line on what to look for.
NimbleMap doesn't host these files. Each link goes to the original source, so you always get the latest version and the publisher's own terms. Links were checked on 19 October 2026.
Start here
Your phone, your watch and your spreadsheets are full of places.
Strava: open an activity, then ⋯ › Export GPX (how). Garmin Connect on the web: open an activity, the gear icon › Export to GPX (how). Apple Health: your picture › Export All Health Data (how); unzip it and the workout-routes folder holds one GPX per outdoor workout. Drop a whole folder of GPX files on NimbleMap at once.
Google Takeout › Maps (your places) gives a Saved Places.json file, which is GeoJSON and opens as points. Your Timeline (location history) now lives on your phone, and its export is a plain JSON file, not a map format NimbleMap opens yet.
Any CSV, TSV or Excel file with latitude and longitude columns opens as points. NimbleMap finds columns named like lat/latitude and lon/lng/longitude and tells you which it picked; if your columns have other names, choose them yourself. A table with only place names, such as countries, US states or Chinese provinces, can be joined to boundaries instead.
NimbleMap.gz file unpacks the same way.Earthquakes, fires and tornadoes, as they happen and over decades.
USGS Earthquake Hazards Program
Every earthquake recorded in the past hour, day, week or month, updated every minute. Colour by mag and you'll see how many small quakes happen that never make the news.
NASA FIRMS
Every fire hotspot satellites detected in the last 24 hours, 48 hours or 7 days. Colour by frp (fire power) to find the fiercest, or filter daynight to compare day and night.
NOAA Storm Prediction Center
73,458 tornado paths from 1950 to 2025, each with its strength, injuries, deaths, length and width. Colour by mag and Tornado Alley draws itself. Hail and wind reports are on the same page.
Gridded NetCDF files: open one and drag the time slider through the months.
NASA GISS (GISTEMP v4)
How much warmer or cooler each 2° square of the planet was each month than the 1951–1980 average. Double-click the .gz to unpack it, then play the time slider and watch the colours turn.
Get the dataNOAA ERSST v5, via NOAA PSL
Monthly ocean surface temperatures back to January 1854, rebuilt from ship, buoy and Argo float measurements. Step through the years and look for El Niño warming the eastern Pacific.
Get the dataGPCP v2.3, via NOAA PSL
Monthly precipitation in mm per day for the whole globe since January 1979, from satellites and rain gauges. Step through one year and watch the monsoon rains move over Asia.
Get the dataWind turbines, reactors, solar farms and mines, each one placed on the map.
US Wind Turbine Database v9.1 (USGS, LBNL, ACP)
77,839 turbines, each with the year it was built (1982 to 2026), its height and its capacity. Colour by year (p_year) and watch wind power spread across the Great Plains.
GeoNuclearData (GitHub)
804 reactors, operating, under construction, planned or shut down, with reactor type and capacity. Filter by Status to see where new ones are being built.
Kruitwagen et al. 2021, Nature (Zenodo)
68,661 solar power installations, outlined by machine learning on satellite images as they stood at the end of 2018. Open predicted_set.geojson and zoom in to see the real shapes of the panel fields.
Maus et al. 2022 (PANGAEA)
44,929 mining areas covering 101,583 km², including open pits, tailings dams and waste dumps, traced by hand from satellite images. Colour by AREA to find the giants. Download the single .gpkg file; the all-files zip asks for an account.
Where people live, and tables you can join to countries by their codes.
simplemaps World Cities Basic
A fuller list than the cities NimbleMap bundles: about 50,000 cities and towns with population and country codes. Colour by population, or filter capital to show only capitals.
Our World in Data
This table has no coordinates, only a Code column of country codes, so join it to NimbleMap's countries and filter by Year. Global life expectancy went from 32 years in 1900 to 73 in 2023.
WorldPop (University of Southampton)
Estimated number of people in every 1 km cell, for any country and any year from 2000 to 2020. Pick China and click cells either side of the Hu Line to compare.
Get the dataAirports, seaports and a whole country's railways.
OurAirports
The full version of the bundled airports layer, updated daily: 42,820 small airstrips, 23,248 heliports, 1,273 seaplane bases, even 63 balloonports. Filter type to find the 13,574 closed ones.
US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (Pub 150)
3,807 seaports, each with more than 100 details such as harbour size, channel depth and the longest ship it can take. Colour by Channel Depth (m) to see which ports take the biggest ships.
National Land Numerical Information N02, MLIT Japan
Every passenger railway and tram line in Japan, with operator and line name, plus every station. Open the GeoJSON files in the UTF-8 folder and colour lines by operator (N02_004). Names are in Japanese.
Ancient roads, heritage sites, temples and two thousand years of Chinese counties.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre
Every World Heritage site, with its category (991 cultural, 240 natural, 42 mixed), the year it was inscribed and whether it is in danger. Colour by category, or filter by year.
Get the dataPleiades gazetteer of ancient places
A gazetteer of 42,404 ancient places, updated several times a week. Download the GIS zip, open places.csv, and use representative_latitude and representative_longitude as coordinates.
Itiner-e, de Soto et al. 2025 (Zenodo)
The roads of the Roman Empire from about 300 BCE to 300 CE, 299,171 km of them, almost double earlier maps. Lay them over today's motorways and see how many still follow the same line.
Get the dataCHGIS V6, Harvard University and Fudan University
Every county seat of imperial China with the year it was set up (BEG_YR) and abolished (END_YR), named in Chinese and pinyin. Filter by year and watch dynasties redraw the map.
BGIS (University of Arizona), via Harvard Dataverse
18,938 Buddhist temples and sites from a 2006 national directory, with Chinese and pinyin names, type and province. Colour by province (PROV_HZ) to see where temples cluster.
Wikidata Query Service
Press Run (it takes about 30 seconds), then Download › CSV file. You get about 23,000 castles with a geometry column that NimbleMap reads as points. Change Q23413 in the query to map lighthouses, monasteries or anything else.
Animal tracks, species sightings, street trees and forests.
GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Nearly 4 billion records of where living things were seen or collected. Search for giant pandas or your favourite bird, download the simple CSV, and map every sighting (coordinates are decimalLatitude and decimalLongitude).
Max Planck Institute, Movebank Data Repository
Satellite tracks of more than 200 white storks tagged in nine countries. One of them, Prinzesschen, was followed for over a decade. Filter by bird (individual-local-identifier) and trace the flyways between Europe and Africa.
NYC Parks 2015 Street Tree Census, NYC Open Data
683,788 street trees, each with species, trunk diameter and health. Colour by health, or filter spc_common to find every ginkgo in the city.
Hansen / UMD / Google / USGS / NASA
A 30-metre map of where forest was cleared, each pixel coded with the year it was lost (2001 to 2025). Download the lossyear tile for your region and click a pixel to read the year.
Rocks from space, the Moon's shadow and the planet's night lights.
The Meteoritical Society, via data.nasa.gov
45,716 meteorites with mass, class, year and whether someone saw it fall. Use reclat and reclong as coordinates, colour by mass (g) and find the giants.
NASA Scientific Visualization Studio
The exact path of totality of the 8 April 2024 eclipse, with duration contours every 30 seconds and bands showing how much of the Sun was covered. The October 2023 annular eclipse is there too.
Get the dataNASA Earth Observatory, Black Marble
The planet's city lights in 2012 and 2016, as GeoTIFFs at 0.1°, 3 km or 500 m. Put the bundled cities on top and see which glow brightest.
Get the dataShops, cafés and anything else on OpenStreetMap, through friendly tools.
All the Places
Store and branch locations collected every week from brand websites: Starbucks, McDonald's, IKEA and thousands more. Search a brand, click Feature GeoJSON, and compare chains city by city.
Get the dataoverpass turbo
Open the Wizard, type something like shop=mall in Shanghai or amenity=drinking_water in Paris, press Run, then Export › GeoJSON.
BBBike
Draw a box around any city, choose Shapefile or GeoJSON, and you get an email when your extract of roads, buildings and shops is ready to download.
Get the dataGeofabrik
Ready-made OpenStreetMap downloads for every country and many regions. The free .shp.zip splits roads, railways, buildings, places of worship and points of interest into separate layers.
Get the dataNational Environment Agency, data.gov.sg
All 129 hawker centres in Singapore, existing and under construction, with addresses and photo links. Colour by STATUS for a small, tasty first map.
Each dataset belongs to its publisher, and the licence on each card is the one the source states. Public domain and CC0 data can be used freely. CC BY, ODbL and similar licences ask you to credit the source when you share a map, for example “Data: USGS” or “© OpenStreetMap contributors”. NC licences rule out commercial use. When in doubt, read the terms on the source page.