Bhutan | Sources of Geospatial Data on Administrative Divisions`

As I am working more on safeguard issues in the Kingdom of Bhutan, I wish to improve my understanding of the state's geography and administrative divisions. This notebook reflects a sort of 'walk through' of my findings in this pursuit.

To the greatest extent possible, I like to work with 'official' data sources—those published and maintained by state agencies.

The first site I came across is the Bhutan Geo Portal, which was designed to allows users to share maps, data, and information about data (metadata) to enhance the awareness about data availability and improved access to geospatial information and different applications.[ref] The Portal was developed by Bhutan's Center for GIS Coordination and the National Land Commission of Royal Government of Bhutan with the support from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and SERVIR-Himalaya (a joint initiative of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and ICIMOD).

On top of Bhutan's Geo Portal are a number of interesting applications. Here's a quick run-down:

Regrettably, at the time of writing this notebook, the Bhutan Geo Portal's main entry point was down. Since the apps listed above don't link to downloads of the underlying data layers, my search continues.

The next set of files I find are hosted on The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), a service maintained by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). HDX has a lot of interesting data on Bhutan, including (at the time of writing) 12 source of 'geodata'.

Being interested as I am in creating a map of the state's administrative divisions, I turn my attention to the layer entitled Bhutan - Administrative Boundaries (levels 0 - 2), uploaded by Ahmadou Dicko. As described on the site, "The administrative level 0 and 1 shapefiles and geodatabase feature classes are suitable for database or GIS linkage to the Bhutan administrative level 0-1 population statistics CSV tables." Sounds great (I'll eventually wish to start joining statistical data to these shapefiles)!

Here's a quick list of the several files options HDX provides for this resource:

Yet something appears to be amiss! This is what I get when loading in and rendering out the btn_adm_bnlc_SHP.zip shapefile:

Not ideal. The admin0 level doesn't exactly conform to my expectations, and the admin1 and admin2 levels aren't readily visible. I might be able to overcome these shortcomings with some work (the object properties differentiate boundaries down to admin4), but I imagine there are easier-to-use datasets out there. Again, my search continues.

After a bit more digging (and broadening my search to 'non-official' sources), I arrive at GADM, the Database of Global Administrative Areas. GADM wants to map the administrative areas of all countries at all levels of sub-division—capturing high spatial resolution and of a extensive set of attributes.

Here are the GADM offerings for Bhutan:

I'll load in the GADM shapefile data (after manually converting it to geojson format) and re-draw the map:

Okay. I'm getting somewhere – this map appears to conform to Bhutan's current political organization.

For good measure, I'll have another look around the Internet to see if I can find another source to verify the GADM dataset.

One quick-to-find resource is MapCruzin is an independent firm specializing in GIS data for professional research and analysis.

MapCruzin provides the following data for Bhutan:[ref]

Regrettably, the MapCruzin `bhutan_administrative.zip` appears to contain the same data as the HDX `btn_adm_bnlc_SHP.zip`, so no dice!

Alas - I'm fairly contented with the GADM-based map, so I'll end my pursuit of administrative division geodata here (for now).

Before concluding this notebook, I'd like to note a few additional sources of geospatial data for Bhutan that look interesting (and worth further exploration... in another future notebook).