Natural Earth

Natural Earth is made by volunteers, many of them members of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), which supports the project.^1,2 Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso and Tom Patterson lead the work.^2,3 It was made for small-scale maps, and its lines are generalised, simplified so that shapes stay recognisable at each scale.¹ All the layers align with one another: where a river is also a border, the two lines coincide.¹

The data come at three scales.⁴ 1:10m is the most detailed, for zoomed-in maps of countries and regions; 1:50m is for zoomed-out maps of countries and regions; 1:110m is for schematic world maps.⁴ Each scale has cultural, physical and, at the two larger scales, raster themes.⁴ They include countries, states and provinces, populated places, urban areas, roads, railroads, rivers and lakes, parks, glaciers, coral reefs, bathymetry, and shaded relief images.¹ Most features carry their names, ranked by importance for labelling.¹ Boundaries are drawn as they are controlled on the ground rather than as claimed, disputed areas are marked, and optional point-of-view versions show borders as several dozen countries see them.^1,2

Everything can be downloaded free with no permission needed, for any purpose including commercial use, and credit is welcome but not required.^3,4 All vector themes come together as shapefile, SQLite or GeoPackage, and a quick-start kit has a sample styled for the QGIS mapping program.⁴ The vector data are also kept on GitHub, where versions follow semantic versioning, so the version number shows how much a new release may break an existing map.⁵ The latest release there is v5.1.2, from May 2022.⁶ Errors are reported through GitHub issues.^2,3

For someone modelling a place, Natural Earth supplies the backdrop for a map of the results, at the scale of a region or the world: coastlines, borders, rivers and cities.^1,4