On our Open Geospatial Data Portal, we hope you will find an accurate and up-to-date collection of geographic information along with tools to help you search for, find, view, and download the data you need in a variety of common formats.

You will always have access to the most recent GIS data here. The data sets available on our Open Geospatial Data Portal are the same GIS data sets we use internally. By accessing data from our portal you are accessing the very same data sets we use in production.

We intend to expand our Open Data initiative and will continue to add new data sets to this site over time.

By making it easy for our community to find and retrieve useful information, we hope to facilitate new opportunities and the economic prosperity of New Hanover County, its businesses, communities, and residents.

Moving forward, it is our intention to direct people looking for GIS data to our Open Geospatial Data Portal. But as we make that transition many of our GIS data sets will remain available for download from our FTP site, just as they had in the past.

This includes:

• A variety of GIS layers as ESRI shapefiles and DBF tables in compressed zip file format
• Black & white aerial photographs taken in 1949, 1956, 1966 (w/o spatial reference)
• Black & white aerial photographs taken in 1981, 1998
• Color aerial photographs taken in 2002, 2006, and 2010

Download ESRI Shapefiles from FTP Site

Download Aerials Photos from FTP Site

Each week, the New Hanover County Tax Department makes a number of data files available for download in both a fixed length text file format, and a Microsoft Access database format.

Download Tax Data from Our FTP Site

Approximately each week, the New Hanover County Register of Deeds creates a small set of files, consisting of several pipe (“|”) delimited text and accompanying TIF images. The file set is packaged and compressed in a zip file format and made available for download from our FTP site.

Download Register of Deeds Data from our FTP Site

For quick access, and to explore our published services, go directly to our REST service directory using your browser:

https://gis.nhcgov.com/server/rest/services/

Here you will find a collection of the GIS services we have published. Expanding the folders will list the stored services.  Expanding a service will provide details, such as a description of the service, and a description of service layers, which includes details about the geometry type and attribute fields.

With the REST Services Directory, you can browse the contents of the GIS services we have published and get service-level metadata, or navigate a series of links to view information about each service. The links also allow you to preview how your service looks in ArcMap, a Web browser, Google Earth, and other options.

Each published layer can also be queried directly from the REST services directory using the supported Query operation and form.

The REST Services Directory is a view of the ArcGIS Server REST API in HTML format. By browsing the contents of our REST Services Directory you can find and obtain information that can be useful when developing applications.

The REST Services Directory works using REST. REST is an architectural style that allows ArcGIS Server to reveal a hierarchy of information about itself through endpoints, or URLs. When you use the REST Services Directory, you navigate through a series of links to discover information about the server. Each time you click a link, you see a new page that reveals additional information about what’s available on the server. The information that you see on the page is retrieved through REST using the page’s URL.

When you develop applications with the JavaScript APIs, you must provide URLs to services and the layers and functionality they expose. The REST Services Directory provides an interactive way for you to construct those URLs through several Supported Operations functions.