Pan-Arctic Political Mask

The Pan-Arctic Political Mask, is a raster based dataset of administrative areas and political boundaries in the NSIDC Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid) with pixel size of 25.067525 meters. This dataset was produced by combining and rasterizing several vector based political datasets. Among these are the Rusray dataset created by Alexander Perepechko and Dmitry Sharkov for Russia, the Standard Geographical Classification (SGC) 2001 for Canada, the Census 2000 County and County Equivalent Areas dataset for the United States and the GADM database of Global Administrative Areas for Europe. The administrative units for Greenland were taken from the Wikipedia article 'Administrative divisions of Greenland' (accessed 6/23/2010). The Dataset consists of 7 variables. A unique key used for identification (PLACECODE2) and three pairs of Name/Code variables corresponding to the three administrative levels Nation, SubNation and Admin.