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Level 1 administrative divisions of Germany, created from GADM data
Original author(s)	Robert J. Hijmans
Initial release	2009; 16 years ago (2009)
Stable release	4.1 / 16 July 2022; 2 years ago (2022-07-16)[1]
Written in	GeoPackage
Type	Geographic Information Systems, Data visualization
License	Copyrighted with academic friendly policy
Website	gadm.org

GADM, the Database of Global Administrative Areas, is a high-resolution database of country administrative areas, with a goal of "all countries, at all levels, at any time period."^[2] Although it is a public database, GADM has a higher spatial resolution than other free databases,^[3] and also higher than commercial software such as ArcGIS.^[4] Those sources are commonly use to complete data analysis with data visualisation such as data plots, choropleth map, etc.^[5][6]

The database is available in a few export formats, including shapefiles that are used in most common GIS applications.^[7] Files for use with the data analysis language R are also available.

GADM is not freely available for commercial use. The GADM project created the spatial data for many countries from spatial databases provided by national governments, NGO, and/or from maps and lists of names available on the Internet (e.g. from Wikipedia).

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