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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Major version increments:
FeatureCla
field attribute values
Minor version increments:
FeatureCla
field attribute values
Patch version increments:
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.
FeatureCla
used in symbolizing data, or significant new additions or significant changes to existing themes.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.