CIESIN’s mission is to provide access to and enhance the use of information worldwide, advancing understanding of human interactions in the environment and serving the needs of science and public and private decision making. CIESIN was one of the first organizations involved in developing and providing interactive data access and mapping tools via the Internet. Given the great diversity of scientific data and information resources now available, CIESIN continues to implement innovative approaches to data identification, access, visualization, and analysis across distributed data systems. Downloadable geospatial data can be accessed from the 'Data and Information' tab in the main menu.