Ever since the ever-popular post, Zipping a shapefile using python, came out, people have been asking (one person, yesterday) for a sample of how to zip a file geodatabase using python. The key trick, as shown in line 17, is appending the basename of the file geodatabase (‘nfg.gdb/’ in my example) in front of each file as you write it to the zipfile. UPDATE: WordPress messes with the spacing when I post code, making it difficult to post code that can just be copied & pasted and have work.

The Iowa Geological Surveyhas a lot of data available to download here. PDF versions of many of their publications can be found in their List of Publications. Their GIS data is minimally attributed for the most part, their public wells data set did have a more robust attribution scheme. One cool feature I found in the wells data is that they provide a hyper-link for many features to an on-line site record.