B-OPEN
B-OPEN: BIRMINGHAM OPEN-ACCESS DATA REPOSITORY
B-OPEN gathers the spatial datasets that planners, researchers, and residents reach for most - each curated from its authoritative public source with notes on geometry, vintage, and use. B-OPEN was developed by the research group of Avinash Unnikrishnan and Moiz Usmani using open source tools and publicly available data.
All datasets on B-OPEN are freely available for public use. For additional data, custom layers, or questions beyond what’s published here, we welcome you to contact us. If you find these datasets and visualizations valuable, we kindly ask that you cite the following paper:
S. Jha, A. Devkota, Y. Seth, A. Jabin, A. Unnikrishnan, M. Usmani. B-OPEN: Birmingham Open-access Data Repository, Under Review: AGU GeoHealth, 2026.
Railroad crashes Jefferson County, AL
This dataset contains at-grade highway–rail crossing locations and related incident information for Jefferson County, Alabama. It includes crossing identifiers, locations, incident counts, fatalities, injuries, trains per day, and annual average daily traffic, with incident records summarized by crossing and year.
Food Deserts
This dataset contains spatial data and processed accessibility measures for assessing access to healthy food across Birmingham City, Jefferson County, Alabama. It includes residential parcels, healthy food outlet locations, transportation networks, nearest grocery store distances, and aggregated food accessibility measures across geographic levels.
Birmingham Urban Heat Island (UHI) Dashboard
The dataset contains monthly LST and monthly UHI raster’s derived from LST observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Land Surface Temperature and Emissivity Daily L3 Global 1 km product (MOD11A1), which provides daytime surface temperature at 1 km resolution.
Jefferson County DEM and Hillshade Dashboard
This dataset was prepared to support spatial analysis and visualization of terrain features. It includes vector layers representing roadway networks and administrative boundaries, along with raster datasets such as elevation and hillshade at multiple resolutions (10 m and 30 m) to support terrain analysis and contextual mapping.
Birmingham PM2.5 Dataset
The dataset contains yearly PM2.5 raster layers for the period 2021–2025, representing the annual average concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) . The raster datasets provide estimates of ambient PM2.5 concentrations, enabling the analysis of air quality patterns, spatial distribution, and temporal trends across the study area.