The Geospatial Data Gateway or Geo-Data Gateway provides easy and consistent access to natural resource data. You can search for available data by geographic area such as county or state, use our point and click map tool to find your area of interest; using a gazetteer, or by entering latitude and longitude coordinates. You can also search for data by theme, such as digital ortho imagery, digital elevation models (DEMs), or soils. You can then view a thumbnail, or sample of the data you’ve chosen to know if you want a copy of the data. If you do, you can either download the data directly onto your machine, pick it up via our ftp site, or order it on media such as CD.
FTP download is free. CD’s are free for USDA personnel and $US 50 for all others. DVD’s are free for USDA personnel and $US 100 for all others.
Select region of interest and then view all available data products. you’ll be amazed at the data that is available. For my region (near Denver) products available included NED, FEMA Q3, TIGER 2002, NED, DEMs, enhanced DRGs, DOQQs, soil surveys, quad indexes, hydrography, transportation data and much more!
This site is amazing! Check it out and you’ll wonder why you ever paid to download free data!
Visit the site, select area of interest, pick data theme(s), select desired projection, register your name and email address, ftp download … it’s that simple!
http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/
PS: we downloaded a 10.9 MB file at a throughput rate of more than 112 KB/sec in about 1.2 minutes.