Data Is Plural

... is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets.

2019.07.10 edition

Flood insurance, internet censorship, ecoregions, California parks, and baseball parks.

Flood insurance. Last month, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency released two major datasets from its National Flood Insurance Program: more than 47 million insurance policies and more than 2 million insurance claims. The latter includes details on each claim’s property, flood zone, amount paid, and more. Both datasets have been partially redacted to remove personally-identifiable information. [h/t Anna Weber]

Internet censorship tests. The Open Observatory of Network Interference, run by the Tor Project, “collects and processes network measurements with the aim of detecting network anomalies, such as censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation.” You can volunteer to run OONI’s tests from your computer or phone; so far, “millions of network measurements have been collected from more than 200 countries since 2012.” You can explore that data online, download it in bulk, and access it via an API. Related: OONI’s blog, which includes reports on some of its findings. [h/t John Emerson]

North American ecoregions. In order to develop its maps of North American ecoregions, the US Environmental Protection Agency consulted with other federal agencies and state agencies, plus the governments of Canada and Mexico. Each “ecoregion” is an area with “similarity in the mosaic of biotic, abiotic, terrestrial, and aquatic ecosystem components with humans being considered as part of the biota.” The maps are available both as PDFs and as geospatial data files, at four levels of increasing specificity. [h/t Brandyn Friedly]

California parks and wilderness. With more than 15,000 “super units,” and an even larger number of subdivisions within them, the California Protected Areas Database is “the authoritative GIS database of parks and open space in California.” It’s one of the two main databases that the California Natural Resources Agency publishes regarding protected lands; the other, the California Conservation Easement Database, tracks restricted-use private land. [h/t @cartonaut]

Ballparks. James Fee has compiled a dataset of more than 400 baseball stadiums from more than 40 leagues around the world; each stadium’s information includes its name, team(s), league(s), and geographic coordinates.