Further sub-divisions like municipalities or communes, depending on the country's specific administrative structure. Working with the Data in Software
You can call the direct URLs in Python via the geopandas library to read spatial boundaries on the fly: download gadm data version 36 work
The data is organized in two ways: a massive global file or country-by-country. Further sub-divisions like municipalities or communes
You have two main download options:
✅ I downloaded from ✅ I selected GeoPackage or Shapefile ✅ I unzipped and checked for .prj and .cpg files ✅ I loaded into QGIS/ArcGIS/R/Python without encoding errors ✅ I used GID_ * fields for joins ✅ I reprojected if necessary (e.g., for area calculations) ✅ I cited the dataset correctly layer="level0") gdf_level1 = gpd.read_file("gadm36_IDN.gpkg"
The layers panel populated instantly:
gdf_level0 = gpd.read_file("gadm36_IDN.gpkg", layer="level0") gdf_level1 = gpd.read_file("gadm36_IDN.gpkg", layer="level1")
