Right now I'm specifically looking for Land Use/Land Cover data but things like roads and soils would be handy in the future as well. In the U.S. my source for nationwide LULC data would be the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium but I don't know the equivalent group/agency in Ecuador, if there is one.
I do have some LULC data for Ecuador and it is pretty detailed, so I think that there is official LULC data for the country but I need to be able to cite my sources. Also, the data I have (from 2008) is in vector format but it was obviously converted from raster, so it would be great if I could get a hold of the original, untouched raster and its metadata. Basically, I'm trying to identify the provenance of the data I do have, and find more of it (for different years) if it exists.
Best Answer
I did find Ecuadoran LULC data on a couple of Ecuadoran government servers, as well as quite a few other layers, if anyone needs them in the future. I was not able to find all the older LULC data I was looking for. Here's what I found. If, like me, you don't speak Spanish, Google Translate is a big help navigating these sites:
El Sistema Nacional de Información (SNI), the National Information System, has soils data, land use/land cover, rivers, and quite a few other layers.
Ministerio de Agricultura, GanaderÃa, Acuacultura y Pesca (MAGAP), the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Aquaculture and Fisheries. This data overlaps a bit with the data available from SNI, but offers several layers that SNI doesn't. They also offer some datasets by province if what you're looking for isn't covered in the nationwide datasets.