Given that this is a USDA resource I really thought that it would be available online somewhere, but for the life of me I cannot find a shapefile for the USDA plant hardiness zones anywhere. Does anyone know where there might be one?
This link is the closest I found but it doesn't seem to offer any sort of shapefile download:
The USDA just issued brand new hardiness zone maps, an interactive web site, and ... shapefiles. I haven't actually looked at the shapefiles, but terms and conditions and download are all here
The news story about the new zones from AP on Yahoo can be found here
With some diligent work from several people, an open sourced version of the hardiness zones have been created. I found this link -
Have you looked here http://www.hardiness-zone-map.com/? The map is implemented with overlays on Google maps. If you read the script that implements the map, you can find where the .png files are located. Not a pretty solution, but it might work.
[edit] I've searched a bit more and found shapefiles for annual mean minimum temperature . It's only a short hop from there to hardiness zone.
Here is a link to a same question as yours in Google+, and with an explanation from "The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture", with reasons why data can't be freely available.
Follow the posts of a woman named "Jeanne Holm". In her third post (Jan 12th, first paragraph) she says:
The issue in releasing that data is that USDA does not actually own the rights to release the data in its machine readable format beyond the government.
her post contain the extended answer directly from USDA
In the third paragraph she presents a solution of short-term to the guy who made the question ("Michael Bernstein"). See if it helps you.
The short-term solution is that I could extract the individual tables from the paper referenced below and load those into Data.gov. And I can do that if it will be helpful. The long-term solution is to liberate data that is gathered or created by the government under the emerging policy changes you can see at the White House Open Data Initiatives that Data.gov is part of: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/opendata and http://project-open-data.github.com/ We are working aggressively to make this happen. Stay tuned.
New discussions started (October, 22th, 2013) on the same Google+ thread and maybe some changes can come in the future.
I don't believe there is an official one available. There appears to be a commercially available digitized version for purchase (I've linked the metadata below):
http://www.climatesource.com/us/fact_sheets/phm_ak_shapefile_metadata.htm
If you search around for a bit, you'll find some online hardiness maps but all the ones I've seen look like they're just raster overlays. I've also seen some states that have digitized their hardiness maps (I've seen Idaho's and Montana's), so if you happen to need a limited dataset and are fortunate about which state you need it from, you might be in luck.
This is an old post, but it's one of the first results in google for those looking for hardiness zone shapefiles. Found this one.... it looks a bit low-res, but it may work for whoever is looking for the same thing I was.
