Among our many ongoing projects and initiatives, facilitating access to geospatial data produced by Wisconsin organizations is an important mission of the State Cartographer’s Office. Working closely with the Arthur H. Robinson Map Library here at UW-Madison, we created the “GeoData” geoportal back in 2014 as one way to connect users to Wisconsin data. We wanted to share some recent updates!
Wisconsin Land Information Program Annual Call for Data
The V12 (2026) data collection (for all layers other than parcels) totaled 381 new datasets now accessible for download via GeoData@Wisconsin. This total is similar to previous years. For V11 we added 379 datasets, for V10 it was 372. The highest totals to date were in 2020 (V6) and 2021 (V7), with 390 collected in those years. With the addition of the forthcoming V12 parcels for all 72 counties plus the statewide parcel layer, our total number of new WLIP datasets for 2026 is 454.
V12 data submitted by Wisconsin counties:
- Addresses (72 counties)
- Roads (72 counties)
- Public Land Survey System (69 counties)
- Zoning (62 counties)
- Rights-of-Way (24 counties)
- Trails (23 counties)
- Hydrography (18 counties)
- Buildings (18 counties)
- Recreation (13 counties)
The number of individual data layers submitted by each county ranged from 3 to a whopping 19! Hope McBride and Akhila Gangireddigari (both graduate students in UW-Madison’s GIS Professional Programs) worked diligently to organize the data and write full ISO metadata for each layer. With their assistance, we were able to publish all V12 layers to GeoData@Wisconsin before the end of the spring term at UW-Madison.
Statewide 2023-2025 DOQQs and County Mosaics Now Available
Thanks to partnership funding received from state and federal agencies and other contributors, the Wisconsin Regional Orthoimagery Consortium (WROC) once again produced a statewide aerial imagery dataset that spans 2023-2025. The public-domain moderate resolution (12″ pixels) imagery is available through GeoData@Wisconsin as both countywide MrSID mosaics, and Digital Ortho Quarter Quads (DOQQs) in GeoTIFF format. This builds upon imagery produced by WROC in 2018-2020, 2014-2015, and 2010.
High-Resolution County Imagery Coming Soon
As part of our goal to permanently archive and preserve Wisconsin aerial imagery, we’ve been reaching out to county governments to request permission to distribute their high-resolution (3″ and 6″ pixels) imagery. As of today, 53 counties have said “yes” and we are working to make their imagery available via GeoData@Wisconsin and our Wisconsin Historic Aerial Imagery Finder (“WHAIFinder”) Web app. Four counties (Iowa, Jackson, Jefferson, Vilas) have cost-recovery policies in place, so they are not able to make their imagery available via GeoData. Seven more counties are considering our request.
Columbia and Washington counties were early-adopters of this effort, for which we are grateful! We also appreciate the folks from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation allowing us to grab data from their internal agency archive when a county gives us permission to distribute their imagery.
All told we expect to add an estimated 80TB of imagery to our archive by the end of the summer. In addition to acquiring imagery through the GeoData@Wisconsin Web interface, we offer a bulk download capability which is more efficient for downloading large volumes of data.
If you represent one of the eight counties that did not acquire imagery through the most recent WROC project (shown as 12″ public domain on the status map above), we are happy to work with you on integrating your high-resolution imagery into both GeoData and WHAIFinder. Contact us anytime.
Climate Collection Also Gets a Boost
The Climate Collection in GeoData was recently updated to include the 2026 release of modeled future climate metrics for Wisconsin, thanks to Dr. Eric Compas from the Department of Geography, Geology, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Dr. David Lorenz from the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The 10 new geospatial datasets contain both complete and simplified versions of the probabilistic downscaled climate modeling data produced by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts’ (WICCI) Climate Working Group. The data is meant for planners, decision-makers, and researchers to incorporate the latest and most detailed climate modeling data into their projects and analysis.
Contact Us
If you are interested in making your Wisconsin geospatial data available via GeoData@Wisconsin, we are happy to discuss options with you. Reach out and let’s talk more.
GeoData@Wisconsin and WHAIFinder are products of the State Cartographer’s Office and Arthur H. Robinson Map Library, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.