LAND RESOURCES OF RUSSIA CD-ROM

Version 1.0, January, 2002
Copyright 2002

All of the data presented on this CD-ROM is available for DOWNLOAD. It has been organized by topic under Socio-Economy, Natural Conditions and Land Endowment. A separate Winzip file has been created for each topic. This contains the databases produced in .dbf format and GIS coverages in both Arc/Ínfo export format and .bil image format.

The databases available on the CD-ROM are stored as .dbf files. These can be imported into various database packages, including Microsoft Excel and Access, as well as various GIS packages including ESRI's Arc/Info.

The majority of the spatial datasets are in vector format and are stored as Arc/Info .e00 export files (uncompressed). These are most easily imported into ESRI's Arc/Info GIS, however, the majority of other GIS packages provide for the import of Arc/Info data. Arc/Info export format was chosen as this system is widely used both in Russia and around the globe. In addition, ESRI has produced a GIS package titled Arc Explorer, that is available to download free of charge from the ESRI website. This package provides basic GIS functionality allowing for database queries, mapping etc. In addition, they provide an import utility to convert Arc Info .e00 export files to shapefiles for viewing in ArcView and Arc Explorer.

Several of the spatial datasets are provided in raster format as .bil (band interleaved by line file) image files. These may be imported into any conventional GIS or graphical packages. Each image file will contain a total of four files with the same name and different extensions, i.e. the population raster image is comprised of: pop.bil, pop.blw, pop.hdr and pop.stx.

All GIS coverages in the Land Resources of Russia CD-ROM are stored in the following coordinate system:

Projection: Lambert Azimuthal
Units: Meters
Datum: None
Parameters:
6370997.24063 (radius of the sphere of reference)
100 0 0.000 (longitude of center of projection)
45 0 0.000 (latitude of center of projection)
0.00000 (false easting (meters))
0.00000 (false northing (meters))

Data Limitations
While all spatial datasets provided on this CD-ROM are stored in the Lambert Azimuthal projection, differences occur between the coverages in terms of resolution and scale. In particular, the outer boundary of Russia, islands and waterbodies may vary between datasets