Geographic Regions for Data Matching

Hydrant supports geographic data matching at multiple levels — from sovereign countries down to city neighborhoods. When you create a Selection and choose a regional preset, the available region schemes and levels are determined by the country context.

This page provides an overview. See the linked sub-pages for detailed information about each country and level.

How It Works

1. In the Selection Editor, choose a Regional Preset (e.g. "Germany", "France (NUTS)", "USA (States)").
2. If the preset is sub-national (single country), a Scheme picker appears with the classification systems available for that country.
3. Within each scheme, pick a Level (e.g. NUTS-1, NUTS-2, NUTS-3).
4. The matching engine maps values in your data column — codes, names, or abbreviations — to the regions at the selected level.

Region Levels at a Glance

Country Level (worldwide)

Europe — NUTS Classification (Eurostat)

The NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) hierarchy is the standard classification for EU + EEA + UK regions, provided by Eurostat (2021 edition).

Countries with full NUTS support (all 3 levels): Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Spain.

Countries with partial NUTS levels: Italy (NUTS-2 + NUTS-3), United Kingdom (NUTS-3 / ITL-3 via admin scheme).

See EU NUTS Regions for the complete per-country breakdown.

Sub-National Administrative Divisions

Countries outside the EU NUTS system use Overture Maps / Natural Earth administrative boundaries.

City-Level Regions

For selected major cities, Hydrant provides granular sub-city region schemes:

Historical Regions (Germany)

Electoral Districts (Germany)

Multi-Country Regional Presets

These presets filter data to a group of countries at the country level (no sub-national breakdown):

Data Matching

The matching engine accepts various input formats depending on the scheme:

• NUTS codes — e.g. DE212, FR101, ES511
• ISO 3166-2 codes — e.g. DE-BY, FR-IDF, US-CA
• Region names — in English, local language, or common alternatives
• Numeric codes — French department numbers (75), ISTAT codes (010), FIPS codes (06001), AGS codes
• ONS codes — for UK regions (E09000007)
• BFS codes — for Swiss districts (B_101)
• Electoral district numbers — for German Wahlkreise (001)

Tip: The matching engine tries codes first (fastest and most reliable), then falls back to fuzzy name matching. Use standardized codes in your data whenever possible.

Data Sources

All geographic boundary data is sourced from authoritative open data providers. Each region in the database carries its source and license metadata.

Total regions in database: ~3,672

Detailed Documentation

• EU NUTS Regions (all countries)
• Germany
• France
• Italy
• United Kingdom
• Switzerland
• Spain
• United States
• Japan
• India
• Other Countries (admin-1)