GADM (Global Administrative Areas) version 3.6 is a comprehensive spatial database providing administrative boundaries for all countries and their subdivisions. While the current release is version 4.1, version 3.6 remains widely used and accessible through the GADM Old Versions page. You can retrieve the data in two primary ways:
A Complete Guide to Downloading and Working with GADM Data Version 3.6
Certain legacy pipelines, R packages, and Python libraries have built-in dependencies or pre-configured scripts optimized specifically for version 3.6. download gadm data version 36 work
For programmatic downloads in code, note that the base download URL for GADM v3.6 is: https://geodata.ucdavis.edu/gadm/gadm3.6/shp/gadm36_$COUNTRY_shp.zip , where $COUNTRY is the three-letter ISO country code.
Get-FileHash -Algorithm MD5 .\gadm36_USA_0_gpkg.zip GADM (Global Administrative Areas) version 3
If you encounter a problem not covered here, check the gadm36 tag on Stack Overflow or the R-sig-geo mailing list – the user community for v3.6 is still very active.
# Install and load the sf package install.packages("sf") library(sf) # Read GADM 3.6 Geopackage Level 1 (e.g., states/provinces) gadm_data <- st_read("gadm36_USA.gpkg", layer = "gadm36_USA_1") # Plot the data to verify plot(st_geometry(gadm_data)) Use code with caution. Working in Python (GeoPandas) For programmatic downloads in code, note that the
Whether you are a student, researcher, or GIS professional, GADM 3.6 remains a gold standard. Bookmark this article and refer to the troubleshooting table whenever a downloaded file refuses to behave.
QGIS is a powerful open-source GIS desktop application that works seamlessly with GADM data. Here are two common approaches: