Last updated on 08/09/2015 - 15:31
Natural Earth, built through a volunteer collaboration and supported by the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), was developed as a public domain resource for making custom maps and offers free vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales.
It was created with the aims of:
- Giving cartographers an off-the-shelf solution for creating small-scale world, regional, and country maps.
- Including many features missing from people’s mental map of the world in the hope of improving overall geographic literacy.
Key features of Natural Earth include
- Vector features include name attributes and bounding box extent.
- Large polygons are split for more efficient data handling.
- Projection friendliness — vectors precisely match at 180 degrees longitude.
- Raster data includes grayscale-shaded relief and cross-blended hypsometric tints derived from the latest NASA SRTM Plus elevation data and tailored to register with Natural Earth Vector.
Documentation:
Online help available in the Advice & Tutorial sections of the Natural Earth online forum.
Format:
- Natural Earth Vector comes in ESRI shapefile format.
- Natural Earth Raster comes in TIFF format with a TFW world file.
- All Natural Earth datause the Geographic coordinate system.
Data Access:
Data freely available on the internet for any type of project. The Terms of Use may be viewed here.