nvkelso / natural-earth-vector

A global, public domain map dataset available at three scales and featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data.

Get the full scoop at NaturalEarthData.com

No, really! This readme is a poor substitute for the live site.

About Natural Earth Vector

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector (here) and raster data (over there), with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.

Natural Earth was built through a collaboration of many volunteers and is supported by NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society), and is free for use in any type of project (see our Terms of Use page for more information).

Get the Data »

Convenience

Natural Earth solves a problem: finding suitable data for making small-scale maps. In a time when the web is awash in geospatial data, cartographers are forced to waste time sifting through confusing tangles of poorly attributed data to make clean, legible maps. Because your time is valuable, Natural Earth data comes ready-to-use.

Neatness Counts

The carefully generalized linework maintains consistent, recognizable geographic shapes at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Natural Earth was built from the ground up so you will find that all data layers align precisely with one another. For example, where rivers and country borders are one and the same, the lines are coincident.

GIS Attributes

Natural Earth, however, is more than just a collection of pretty lines. The data attributes are equally important for mapmaking. Most data contain embedded feature names, which are ranked by relative importance. Other attributes facilitate faster map production, such as width attributes assigned to river segments for creating tapers.

Versioning

The 2.0 release in 2012 marked the project's shift from so-called marketing versions to semantic versioning.

Natural Earth is a big project with hundreds of files that depend on each other and the total weighs in at several gigabytes. SemVer is a simple set of rules and requirements around version numbers. For our project, the data layout is the API.

• Version format of X.Y.Z (Major.Minor.Patch).
• Backwards incompatible changes, increment the major version X.
• Backwards compatible additions/changes, increment the minor version Y
• Bug fixes not affecting the file and field names, patch version Z will be incremented.

Major version increments:

• Changing existing data file names
• Changing existing data column (field) names
• Removing FeatureCla field attribute values
• Additions, deletions to admin-0
• Introduce significant new themes

Minor version increments:

• Any shape or attribute change in admin-0
• Additions, deletions, and any shape or attribute changes in admin-1
• Additions, deletions to any theme
• Major shape or attribute changes in any theme
• Adding, changing FeatureCla field attribute values
• Introduce minor new themes

Patch version increments:

• Minor shape or attribute changes in any theme
• Bug fixes to shape, attributes in any theme

Under this scheme, version numbers and the way they change convey meaning about the underlying code and what has been modified from one version to the next.

When we introduce a new version of Natural Earth, you can tell by the version number how much effort you will need to extend to integrate the data with your map implementation.

• Bug fixes Z: can simply use the new data files, replacing your old files.
• Minor version Y: limited integration challenges.
• Major version X: significatnt integration challenges, either around changed file strucutre, field layout, field values like FeatureCla used in symbolizing data, or significant new additions or significant changes to existing themes.

&etc

Natural Earth is maintained by Nathaneiel V. KELSO (@nvkelso) and Tom Patterson.

The project transitioned to Github in 2012. Versioned files are here to collaborate around. The frontend still lives at NaturalEarthData.com.

natural-earth-vector's Issues

Add Salish Sea to marine label areas

http://t.co/hk3GFI6m

The term Salish Sea is quite new, dating officially from 2010 when both Canadian and American geographical boards adopted the name. The sea comprises of the Strait of Gerogia, Pugeot Sound and Strait of Juan de Fuca. Think of it this way, imagine if the Mediterranean Sea was only known as a group of a dozen seas (Aegean, Ionian, Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, Cilician, Libyan, Crete, Ligurian, Belearic, Alboran Seas, etc.) but had no unifying name. Well that's the case with the Salish Sea. A combination of a national border and somewhat unique geography likely prevented a unified name. Thanks to geographic societies and professionals we now have a unified name. Quick question: Is the Johnstone Strait part of the Salish Sea? Should it be included?

Add canals

Oh, I wish there was a shapefile with canals. Rhine-Danube, Volgo-Don, Belomorcanal and others

Admin-1 adds for Chad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Chad

add disputed areas between Israel and Palestine (West Bank)

No Man's Land (Fort Latrun) B78
No Man's Land (Jerusalem) B79
East Jerusalem B98
Mount Scopus B99

Modify Saint Pierre and Miquelon and Canada maritime indicators and adm0 codes for couple islands

See the US State Department high resolution 1:250k product.

Add Pacific Grouping line for Clipperton Island

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivisions_of_French_Polynesia

Add a million new admin-1 for Latvia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_Latvia

funky number field formats in Natural Earth (populated places)

mapnik/mapnik#1605 (comment)

Resolve if Nepal has 14 zones or 5 development regions as admin-1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:NP
http://www.statoids.com/unp.html
http://www.flickr.com/places/info/23424911

Missing a few admin-1 in Senegal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Senegal

Modify Aland and Finland maritime indicators and adm0 codes for couple islands

See the US State Department high resolution 1:250k product.

Admin-1 splits in Gambia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambia#Administrative_divisions

Modify Greece, Turkey maritime indicators and adm0 codes for couple islands

See the US State Department high resolution 1:250k product.

Add disputed islands between Eritrea and Djibouti

Eritrea ERI
Eritrea ERX
Doumera Island B87

synch up time zones with DST

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone.tab

from

@twbell's great:
https://github.com/twbell/world_timezones

Change character encoding to UTF-8 from Windows 1252

http://support.esri.com/en/knowledgebase/techarticles/detail/21106

Add admin-1 for Guinea (only admin-1 regions now)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefectures_of_Guinea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Guinea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:GN

adm1 codes (missing FIPS, partial HASC, need ISO)

See this thread in the forums:
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/forums/topic.php?id=471&replies=3#post-1048

add disputes between Slovenia and Croatia

Land dispute along the Dragonja River

HRV Croatia
B82 Dragonja River

RELATED

Gulf of Piran disputed maritime boundary indicator

10m road has bad record

Hope you don't mind me opening an issue directly on here rather than posting elsewhere.

I was investigating a failure of some software which was blowing up when reading the 10m roads shapefile.
It turns out that my code doesn't handle empty points in a record, which is precisely what one of the records in this particular shapefile have:

import shapefile

fname = 'natural_earth/cultural/10m_roads.shp'
r = shapefile.Reader(fname)
rec = r.shapeRecord(8126)
field_names = [field[0] for field in r.fields[1:]]
for name, field in zip(field_names, rec.record):
    print '{}: {}'.format(name, str(field).strip())
print 'POINTS: ', rec.shape.points

Resulting in:

scalerank: 100
featurecla: Road
...
edited: Mystry can't be deleted?
name: 
...
POINTS: []

Obviously, I will update my code to handle a record with no points, but I wanted to let you know about this so that you can remove the lingering entry if you so wish.

Cheers,

Israel sov_a3 to `IS1`

Otherwise Israel the country and the sov have the same code.

Add disputed area Brasileira I. between Brazil and Uruguay

B85 Braziliera I. Uncontested boundary dispute between Brazil and Uruguay over Braziliera/Brasiliera Island in the Quarai/Cuareim River leaves the tripoint with Argentina in question

France overseas regions adm-1 codes need revisit

add disputed area between Honduras and El Salvador

Admin. By Honduras; Claimed by El Salvador Honduras (Conejo Island) B81

Biggest Repo in github !

This is biggest repository in github ! More then 20GB !!!
Why you dont split this ?
Why you commit data db files ?
Github repo for cods and small files not this heavy files !

Create and distribute spatial index files with each SHP

Mapnik style Shapeindex
https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/Mapnik2
shapeindex shapes/*.shp

MapServer style (*.qix)
http://mapserver.org/utilities/shptree.html
shptree us_states.shp
http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_shapefile.html

Esri style using ArcPy (thanks @williamscraigm):
https://gist.github.com/4091182

Update 2004 admin-1 for Qatar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipalities_of_Qatar

Some consolidation and splits.

Update NZ roads, railroads

From Rog and team Geographix

Add dispute between Benin and Burkina Faso

B86 Benin (dispute with Burkina Faso)

Update maritime indicator for Nicaragua and Columbia

Colombia got mixed results in their ICJ case:

http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21567986-colombia-smarts-loss-territorial-waters-islet-sea

Metropolitan France should receive `FR` ISO code (like Norway)

Update Chad's admin-1 to 22 regions since 2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Chad

Spain overseas regions adm-1 codes need revisit

Canary Islands

update the web Merc makefile with new 2.0 themes

Split Guinea Bissau's admin-1 Bolama into Biombo for mainland area near Bissau

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_Bissau#Regions_and_sectors

Remove Sandy from coastline, other datasets.

We got caught by this junk DNA, too.

Promote Kingman Reef KQI to scale rank 6

This will ensure it's included in all the admin-0 themes. Now it's missing (only present in the scale rank version).

Add admin-1 for Hong Kong

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Districts_of_Hong_Kong

http://www.flickr.com/places/info/24703007
http://www.flickr.com/places/info/24703006
http://www.flickr.com/places/info/29281899
http://www.flickr.com/places/info/24703004
http://www.flickr.com/places/info/24703005

null or bad binary data in several 10m themes?

See this tix:
mapnik/mapnik#1621 (comment)

Naming of Russian lakes

Most reservoirs are called reservoirs, but the Votkinskoe vodokhranilishche is still called so, should be renamed Votkinsk Reservoir.

Secondly, when zooming from the 50 version to the 10 scale shp the Samara Reservoir is named first Samara (Kuybyshev) res., then simply Samara Reservoir. It's not consequent.

Change Pinnacles NM to NP in protected lands theme

http://www.sfgate.com/news/us/article/Obama-signs-bill-creating-new-nat-l-park-in-Calif-4183678.php#ixzz2HcVk4fWT

river Kama needs a more important scale rank 10m, 50m

The mighty river Kama deserves a place on the 50m theme. She's much bigger than the Danube, Mississipp, Rhinei or others

Between lake Onega and the White Lake/Lake Beloye in the southeast flows rivers Vytegra and Kovzha. Nowadays they form part of the Volgo-Baltic Waterway but they are still proper rivers themselves

Best regards Max S, Sweden

Add missing North-East and municipal districts in Botswana

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Districts_of_Botswana

Update NZ towns, rivers, lakes, physical areas, coastline, etc

From Roger and team Geographix

Add Luxor adm-1 in Egypt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governorates_of_Egypt

Add Korean islands under UN jurisdiction

KNM Korean islands under UN jurisdiction
B84 Korean islands under UN jurisdiction

N.L.L. Is.
NLL

Since 1953 islands south of maritime Northern Limit Line, patrolled by South Korea including Yeonpyeong, Baengnyeong, and Daecheong Is.

Promote Palmyra Atoll LQI to scale rank 6

This will ensure it's included in all the admin-0 themes. Now it's missing (only present in the scale rank version).

add disputed area between Belize and Honduras

B80 Sapodilla Cayes
Admin. by Belize; Claimed by Honduras and Guatemala.

Use more local names in populated places & admin_0

http://www.naturalearthdata.com/forums/topic.php?id=452

Once concordance with WOE is complete, this can be x-checked between there and GeoNames and elsewhere.

Modify Taiwan, China maritime indicators and adm0 codes for couple islands on mainland coast

See the US State Department high resolution 1:250k product.