Ulster County GIS layers can be found below. These layers are available for download at no cost as zipped ESRI shapefiles. Also, we have provided links to 3rd party GIS data. This is not a comprehensive list, just the most frequently used 3rd party data.
Custom data and imagery requests are fulfilled by Ulster County GIS. Your data request will be reviewed carefully, and a custom data set will be defined to best meet your needs. Several data formats and delivery options are available. Minimum cost is $154.80. If you require custom datasets please contact us at 845-334-5300 or at gis[at]co.ulster.ny[dot]us.
PLEASE NOTE that you will need geographic information system (GIS) or mapping software to view or use these datasets.
Desktop GIS software for viewing and analysis:
- QGIS (free and open source)
- ArcGIS Pro (license required)
- Google Earth (for use with KMZ files) & Shapefile to KML Converter Tool
API Access for Developers: REST Services Directory - https://gis.ulstercountyny.gov/server/rest/
Ulster County Datasets
Ulster County Tax Parcels
Ulster County digitized tax parcel boundaries with a selected set of information from the assessors' RPS database. Maintained by Ulster County Real Property Tax Service Agency. Data is suitable for tax mapping and general mapping purposes. Official NYS Property Class definitions can be found at NYS Department of Tax & Finance (Last Updated 10/2024, 74MB)
Ulster County 2ft Contours
This data set contains topographic contour lines of Ulster County, NY, for cartographic display and relief analysis. Produced from the 2014 LiDAR dataset and 2015 topographic 1m Digital Elevation Model. Contour intervals of 2 feet were produced in NAD_1983_2011_UTM_Zone_18N Projected Coordinate System. Due to the size of the dataset, it has been broken into small shapefile tiles available for download at https://ulstercountyny.gov/maps/contours/. These files can be used in any GIS application and imported into AutoCAD. If you wish to obtain a complete set of this contour data it is available in an ESRI v9.3.1 geodatabase, compressed to (~7GB). (Last Updated 2016)
Ulster County Surface Water
Surface water features (Area and Linear files) in Ulster County derived from LiDAR datasets and 1ft orthoimagery. (Last Updated 2015, 26MB)
Download Shapefile Area Water Google Earth KMZ Linear Water Google Earth KMZ
Ulster County Election Districts
Election districts within Legislative districts based on town boundaries and 2020 Census block population. (Last Updated 2023, 1MB)
Ulster County Legislative Districts
Legislative districts developed as part of the 2021 Commission on Reapportionment. Boundaries were based on 2020 census data. (Last Updated 2023, 1MB)
Ulster County Zoning
This dataset includes a county-wide archive from 2004, in which all current town zoning maps were digitized. This dataset also includes more recent updates for the City of Kingston (08/2018, including overlay districts), Town and Village of New Paltz, Town of Rochester, Town of Wawarsing, Town of Woodstock and Town of Marbletown. (Last Updated 04/2020, 7MB)
Download Shapefile Google Earth KMZ
Ulster County Habitat Cores
This dataset was developed by the Green Infrastructure Center as part of 2014 case study which describes how a green infrastructure network is created by selecting the highest-value habitats. This download includes the Habitat Cores as a shapefile and as a raster image. It also includes Chapter 5 of the NY Practitioners Guide as well as the notes file for creating the Ulster Model (Last Updated 2018, 77MB)
Building Footprints
Microsoft
This dataset provides a single county subset of Microsoft's computer-generated building footprints. The original footprints, covering all 50 US States, were created via a two-stage process. In the first step, semantic segmentation, a deep neural network was used to recognize building pixels on Bing aerial imagery, which is a composite of multiple sources of varying dates. In the second step, building pixels blobs were converted into polygons. It is not perfect, particularly in dense urban areas. This dataset provides a relatively complete dataset of building outlines, especially useful for areas where official building footprints may not exist.
OpenStreetMap
The Geofabrik download server has excerpts and derived data from the OpenStreetMap dataset available for free download. Most of these files are updated every day – any change you upload to OpenStreetMap should be on our download server the next day.
Land Cover
University of Vermont Spatial Analysis Laboratory
This dataset was developed to support land-cover mapping and modeling initiatives in the Delaware River Basin. At the time of its publication, it represented the most accurate and detailed land cover map for the Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania portion of the Delaware River Basin.
Aerial Imagery
NYS Office of Cyber Security
NYS Orthos Online provides access to all years of the NYS high resolution imagery as well as the NAPP imagery, so users will be able to view multiple vintages of imagery around the state.
Digital Elevation Models (DEMs)
U.S. Geological Survey
The purpose of this LiDAR data was to produce high accuracy 3D elevation products, including tiled LiDAR in LAS 1.2 format, 3D breaklines, and 1 meter cell size hydro flattened Digital Elevation Models (DEMs). All products follow and comply with USGS Program Lidar Base Specification Version 1.0. The DEMs were made from multiple LIDAR collection projects. The DEM files can be downloaded from the NYS Orthoimagery Application below..
Streets / Roads
NYS Office of Cyber Security
Vector file of public/private streets and ferry crossings compiled from orthoimagery and other sources. Attributed with street names and route numbers.
Address Points
NYS Office of Cyber Security
Point file of buildings and properties in New York State.
Census Geographic Datasets
United States Census Bureau
Point and vector boundary files of census information in Ulster County. Census tablular data can be found at the American FactFinder website.
NYS Zip Codes
United States Postal Service
U.S. ZIP Code Areas provides ZIP Code, postal district name, population, and area for the ZIP Code areas in the United States.
3rd Party - Water Resources
National Hydrography Dataset (NHD)
United States Geological Survey (USGS)
The National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) is the surface water component of The National Map. It contains features such as lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, canals, dams and streamgages. NHD contains a flow network that allows for tracing water downstream or upstream. It also uses an addressing system based on reach codes and linear referencing to link specific information about the water such as water discharge rates, water quality, and fish population. Using basic NHD features like flow network, linked information, and other characteristics, it is possible to study cause and effect relationships, such as how a source of poor water quality upstream might affect a fish population downstream.
National Flood Hazard Layer
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
National Flood Hazard Layer (NFHL) dataset is a compilation of effective Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) databases (a collection of the digital data that are used in GIS systems for creating new Flood Insurance Rate Maps) and Letters of Map Change (Letters of Map Amendment and Letters of Map Revision only) that create a seamless GIS data layer for United States and its territories. The NFHL is updated as new study or LOMC data becomes effective. Note: Currently, not all areas have modernized FIRM database data available. As a result, users may need to refer to the effective Flood Insurance Rate Map for effective flood hazard information. County and community-based NFHL extracts are updated as new data is received, however State extracts are updated only once every two weeks if new data is received during the two week window.
Freshwater Wetlands
NYS Department of Environmental Conservation
These data are a set of ARC/INFO coverages composed of polygonal and linear features. Coverages are based on official New York State Freshwater Wetlands Maps as described in Article 24-0301 of the Environmental Conservation Law. Coverages are not, however, a legal substitute for the official maps.
National Wetlands Inventory
US Fish & Wildlife Service
This data set represents the extent, approximate location and type of wetlands and deepwater habitats in the conterminous United States. These data delineate the areal extent of wetlands and surface waters as defined by Cowardin et al. (1979).
Tidal Wetlands
NYSDEC Hudson River Estuary Program
A map of the extent and composition of tidal wetlands in the Hudson River Estuary.
Aquifers
NYS Department of Environmental Conservation
These aquifers were digitized using a set of five 1:250,000 scale maps of unconsolidated New York State aquifers, excluding Long Island, originally created by the USGS in partnership with the NYSDEC in the mid 1980s.
3rd Party - Geology & Soils
Bedrock Geology
NYS Museum
Digitized from NYS Geological Survey Map & Chart Series Number 15, available from the NYS Museum Publications Departmen
Surficial Geology
NYS Museum
Digitized from NYS Geological Survey Map & Chart Series Number 40, available from the NYS Museum Publications Department
Soils
USDA
Web Soil Survey (WSS) provides soil data and information produced by the National Cooperative Soil Survey. It is operated by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and provides access to the largest natural resource information system in the world.
3rd Party - Districts Boundaries
New York Assembly Districts
Empire State Development
The Assembly District Boundaries of New York State contains 150 Districts with corresponding Representatives' Names.
Municipal Boundaries
NYS Office of Cyber Security (OCS)
Vector files of boundaries of incorporated places in New York State (state, counties, cities, towns, villages, and reservations). Data is copyright protected.
Agricultural Districts (Ag and Markets)
NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets
These GIS files represent geographic boundaries for lands that are under the protection of NYS Agricultural District Law, administered by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets. The boundaries are derived from New York State Agricultural District, 1:24,000-scale, maps produced at county agencies. The district boundaries correspond to tax parcel data.
School Districts
NYS Department of Taxation and Finance, Office of Real Property Tax Services (ORPTS)
School District Boundaries - 2004
3rd Party - Environmental Data
Biologically Important Areas
NYS DEC Natural Heritage Program
This dataset indicates areas of biological and ecological importance to the health of the Hudson River estuary. Only areas not currently under public or private conservation management were included. Areas were included if they contain vulnerable, exemplary, and highly diverse clusters of species and habitats. Special consideration was given if the habitat and species are of global, state, and/or regional importance.
Bird Conservation Areas
NYS Department of Environmental Conservation
This data set shows point locations of Bird Conservation Areas. Bird Conservation Areas are New York State lands that have been officially designated for their value to bird conservation.
Submerged Aquatic Vegetation
NYS Department of Environmental Conservation
Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) is an important habitat and site of primary production in many aquatic ecosystems but there was no baseline information on SAV extent or distribution in the tidal freshwater Hudson River. In 1994, a collaboration was initiated between the Institute of Ecosystem Studies (IES), the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve/NYSDEC and the Cornell Laboratory for Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing (CLEARS, now the Cornell Institute for Resource Information Systems (IRIS) http://www.css.cornell.edu/iris/index.htm. These groups provided diverse expertise to enable the first broad delimitation of SAV in the Hudson.
