On the cultural front, North America gets roads and rails. General 10m detail roads and railroads come from the CEC North America Environmental Atlas. The supplementary roads are donated by XNR Productions and are at 1m scale, thanks Laura M. and Rob!

If you have data or time to contribute, especially to flesh out the new transportation and hydro themes, please contact me at nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com.

Note: We are not committing to building out supplementary level of detail in the rest of the world (we’re not THAT crazy!), but will incorporate such data if you contribute it. As always, we edit these data files but you should too before you publish maps using them. Feed us back corrections.

(below) Rivers and lakes in North America. On the left the version 1.1 hydro features. On the right in color are the new, supplemental version 1.2 hydro features, 4x the density of features at the same 10m linework generalization.

(below) Rivers and lakes in Europe. On the left the version 1.1 hydro features. On the right in color are the new, supplemental version 1.2 hydro features, 4x the density of features at the same 10m linework generalization.

(below) Highways (red and blue) and ferry routes in North America.

(below) Supplemental road detail in North America. Slightly different feature class scheme and data vintage.

(below) Railroads in North America.

• Download version 1.1 changed files (54.5 MB) version 1.1.2

NOTE: Version 1.1.1 corrects the name of the 50m cultural “50m_admin_0_countries” file by adding the missing “r” (XQHSANQW71), updated March 15, 2010. Thanks Ben!

Thanks to over 50 contributors for making version 1.1 happen!

Tom, Dick, Craig, Jill, Landon, Preston, Nancy, Alfred, Brett, Annemarie, Hans, Martin, Kristin, Gene, Laris, Donatas, Kevin, Kurt, Tom, Xan, Bill, Ed, Uffe, Jochen, Christopher, Carlos, Barry, Alex, Victor, Kimi, Steve, daan, Maxb, Matt, Eugene, Damien, mizDannasag, Zoonseovasupem, Chris, Bjørn, Prof. Ward, Michael, Roy, Daniel, Kim, Gustav, Uwe, Geoff, Kumiko, Robert, Mike, Hugo, and Leo.

If you have a few hours to help, please check out the TODO listings below and email me at nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com.

Visitors: 123,000 page views since we launched in early December, 2009. Over 30,000 visits (20,000 unique) from 157 ISO countries, or 4.25 pages per visit. 65 percent are new visits. Visitors spend an average of 3 minutes 51 seconds on the site with a bounce rate less than 50 percent. Source: Google Analytics.

Downloads: 34,000. Three out of 4 downloads is ala cart, except for 10m cultural which is 1 out of every 2. Three out of every 4 downloads is for the 10m, with the rest split between 50m and the 110m.  Just less than 1 out of every 2 downloads is for the raster. Source: Download Manager.

CHANGE LOG THIS RELEASE:

Overall

• ADDED – National Parks for the United States of America.
• ADDED – Landscan urban polygons (masks for population extraction out of original LandScan data). Keep using the existing urban areas theme, this one is for research modeling only.
• REMOVED – admin 0 marine boundary lines. The indicator lines are still there.

More than 50% changes

• 10m, 50m, 110m Cities has new towns being added, 30m selection created, various corrections, now include geonames.org IDs, bounding boxes from the landscan data, and historical populations for 500 mega cities. As this triples the file size, a new “simple” version is also available with the updates, but not the full attributes.
• 50m and 110m Admin 0 and admin-1 get better country names and thematic codes, including slight reranking of some units and link out to the Correlates of War database (cShapes).
• 50m and 110m Admin 0 and admin-1 in 10m are rebuilt to fix coastline offset and overlaps and gaps between countries and state/province lines.
• 10m, 50m, 110m Geographic label points for peaks and summits. Now spun off into separate feature class.
• 110m country boundaries, missing countries, added missing mid-range islands. Includes Caspian sea and admin-0 scale ranks.
• All files names now use “_” underscore instead of “-” in filename for better compatibility with ArcMap.
• Handful of file name changes for consistency.

Less than 5% changes

• 10m Rivers and lakes. A couple names, fixed the scaleRanks to show as integers rather than strings.
• 10m, 50m Updated the geographic areas marine names (Indonesia straight).
• 10m, 50m Updated the geographic areas polys names (Seward Penn, Alaska).
• 10m coastline updates for Venice. Same for land and ocean.
• 10m bathymetry updates for several island mounts.
• 10m Antarctic ice shelves, now includes ice shelf names.
• 10m glaciated areas: names cleaned up, feature class column filled in.
• 10m, 50m, 110m WGS84 bounding box has more point to aid in reprojecting as a linearized curve.
• Fixed TWF extent on the raster imagery to improve import into popular open source GIS packages.
• 50m ocean can now project into web Mercator.
• 110m all cultural and most physical themes now inside the +/- 180, +/- 90bounding box.

TODO, spring 2010:

• Better thematic codes and names on admin-1 (about 50%, can someone help on the other 50%?)
• 10m Admin 0 and admin-1 get better country names and thematic codes, including slight reranking of some units and link out to the Correlates of War database (cShapes).
• 10m Admin 0 and admin-1 in 10m are rebuilt to fix coastline offset and overlaps and gaps between countries and state/province lines.
• 10m Coastline and land edits in 10m: Add in Greenland islands for towns. Remove several duplicate Pacific islands.
• 10m Admin-1 with clipped poly and lines for larger lakes. ZZ7DR1ZXAU
• Tribal areas in the US (US Census).
• US National Forests (CEC North American Atlas).
• More rivers in US, Mexico, and Canada; in Europe. Selection done, tapering in progress (CEC North American Atlas; European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environmental Sustainability). Will include minor updates to existing rank 0 to 8 rivers in terms of headwaters.
• More towns in US, Mexico, and Canada. Selection done, location research remains on ~200 (CEC North American Atlas)
• Roads – in US, Mexico, and Canada.
• ArcMap MXD / Layer file

TODO NEXT, fall 2010:

• Adding georeferenced manual shaded relief plates for select areas (US National Park Service).
• Possibly more from the gRoads project. Data source identified. (CEC North America Atlas, gRoads CIESEN)
• Urban areas – gain names, more towns get latLng bounding box, remove bad polygons, move some. Data source identified. (University of Madison, Wisconsin)
• Wetlands – polygons. Data source identified. (University of Madison, Wisconsin)
• Incorporate US physiographic regions from Matt Fox. Other refinements to the polys. Data source identified. (USGS)
• Add in alt names for more populated places using GeoNames ids.
• World protected areas (terrestrial, marine)

Other

• Are we missing a theme or have one to contribute? Please comment on this post!

After the jump, full listing of changes.

NOTE: This is NOT an exhaustive list of changes. It includes the publicly submitted Correction requests (and their tracking IDs) and the majority of other changes made by the authors. If you have a question about one of the changes listed (or missing), please comment on this post.

GENERAL File names:

• more consistency between the file names between the 10m, 50m, and 110m coverages: TNTYR1P4SL, E9ZGN9EMH4, 1B3PM884DW, AMMMVG69RD, Y3EA4YSVQV, GN7JQJ69PV, TXXQDW5L78, YLPMNZ245V
• All “-” characters in file names have been replaced with “_” characters.
• “with” has been removed from names that include “scale_rank” (rivers, etc).

Cities:

• 30m selection from 20m
• resort various other cities
• Better ranking and selection of of high latitude cities (Canada, Russia, etc)
• Lithuania “Panevezy” city (or “Panevėžys” in local form). TGGAGZGUYA
• Santa Cruz, Calif. not Monterrey WTPZZURTH2, PZRDHJ9Q8X
• Use better country names on the spatial join column (easy after the CountryNames.xls join)
• M7LLU3MUR8 Your populated places in Democratic Republic of Congo (COD) are all labeled as being in Congo Brazzaville, while those in Congo Brazzaville (COG) are labelled as being in Congo Kinshasa
• A9SAGXV9EE You have a populated place on the Rwanda side of the Rwanda/DRC border at the NE corner of Lake Kivu. The name is given as Goma, and the alternative name as Gisenyi. Country is given as Rwanda. Add Gisenyi as separate townspot. Adjust admin-1 and admin-0 bounds.
• Leo’s multiple Suggested corrections on populated places
• DP4NDPW57U St. John’s (FID 1233) is not classified as an Admin-1 capitol, when it should be.
• Fix corrupted diacritical marks: Here’s what happened to diacritics for “St. Mart??n Station” in Antarctica (south of Argentina). This looks like a disaster. UPDATE: There are only 16 possible corruptions. There are about 50 cities with diacritical marks now
• Places in Japan: 7MW5BGDGWA, PBPHDWS2BA, AWBXDMPRHA
• Latitude and longitude fields recalculated: A59N4GQ23S
• Names in Scandanavia: YJ31T7QTMU
• Mega cities historical population from the UN for 500+ cities. Edited to match existing NE places rather than using more generalized UN placement.
• Added missing mega cities, particularly in China and India, using GeoNames locations.
• Geoname IDs on bulk of towns. Use this link ID to gain local language names.
• Landscan matching bounding box extents on bulk of towns.

Admin-0 countries and details:

• Admin-0 names disagree between the 10m, 50m and 110m features.
• Use consistent column names.
• Includes link out to Correlates of War database.
• 8T5X3RXGQH, ZDPMVAX7G2, 9ZTTJYAZ33, HQJUJY6T1J
• Faroe (Faroese) islands moved up to same rank as Greenland. UML5P6LNM9
• Canary Island ranking: AXRUUBXY43

Physiographic (geography) label areas, points:

• Repositioned elevation points to to land on summits in the raster imagery.
• More summits have names.
• Added peaks from PeakBagger.com (country high points and more)
• Spun elevation points off into separate theme.
• Corrected location of Seward Peninsula in polys.

Graticules

• 10m, 50m, 110m WGS84 bounding box has more point to aid in reprojecting as a linearized curve.

Rasters:

• Now have correct extents, as of January (no change with this release): AAUNBU8H6D

10M SPECIFIC

Disputed areas:

• Kashmir: LLAHP8ZLGL, M286H8MVDP
• Golan Heights, etc.
• Overlays for Baikonur, Diego Garcia, etc.

Rivers:

• River attributes for Scale Ranks and stroke weight were string rather than int. TPYEMX98YT
• Dissolved rivers now preserves lake centerlines so they can avoid being labeled (removing conflict with lake labels).
• River Neris versus more important Nemuna (which is shown only from the Baltic sea to Kaunas). X6G88G56NS

Lakes:

• A lake south of Kaunas is actually an artificial reservoir made by damming Nemunas and called “Kauno marios” (Kaunas). It supports the largest hydroelectric power plant in Lithuania. 84871518GL
• Better sorted the US Great Lakes polygons: R6RL3M3TSE

Coastline, minor islands, and land:

• Added handful of Greenland islands (in later update)
• Removed Pacific duplicate island coastline (in later update)
• Two Venice islands (this update)

Marine areas:

• Straight and Sound abbreviations spelled out. Makassar Straight in Indonesia expanded. EPX5M6ERTB

Other 10m:

• 10m bathymetry updates for island mounts.
• 10m Antarctic ice shelves (most now named)
• 10m glaciated areas

Admin-1:

These  10m admin-1 updates will be pushed out in 1.2 update. If you need them now, contact nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com for a prerelease copy.

• Added more points along lines for smooth curves on projection of large polygons.
• Use improved admin-0 boundaries. Use improved coastlines. Remove overlap / gap between polygons.
• Recode some bad admin-0 column attributes. M7LLU3MUR8
• Rwanda redo: 2GXAW4HQ1M
• Congo and Yemen adds, resort 4NLED2STS2
• Germany adjustments Z4BN7R9DU4
• Name adjustments in Japan: 7MW5BGDGWA
• Admin-1 with clipped poly and lines for larger lakes. ZZ7DR1ZXAU

50m SPECIFIC

Ocean:

• Can now project ocean into Web Mercator: GP8LGY53RX

Marine areas (labels):

• Straight and Sound abbreviations spelled out. Makassar Straight in Indonesia expanded. EPX5M6ERTB

Populated Places

• Mega cities are now included.

110m SPECIFIC

Admin-0, Admin-1:

• Add missing countries of Kosovo and Montenegro missing. HZP3V4X1DH
• Duplicate consecutive points in North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. 89272PRVWP
• Add missing mid sized islands. MAP7RQQS86
• Adjust some boundaries.
• Now inside the true +/- 180, +/- 90 bounding box.
• Offer scale rank and dissolved version of the admin-0. 8T5X3RXGQH
• Lake Victoria boundaries. YLPMNZ245V
• Admin-0 file name now consistent with 10m and 50m. YLPMNZ245V
• Admin-1 poly and lines match adjusted coastlines

Populated Places:

• Regional capitals no longer appearing in the 110m populated places selection.

Coastline, Lakes:

• Missing Caspian Sea: J3ZRB2U8RU
• Coastline adjustments to match the land, admin-0, admin-1

The bad extent was throwing an error for some GIS systems on import and leaving gaps when reprojecting in the area of the international date line for others.

We’ve tested in ArcGIS 9.3.x in NSD Pro 5 georeferencing the rasters with the TFW files and reprojecting them. No funny gaps appeared at the 180th meridian. Thanks for edcorkery and user4815162342 in the Forums for first discovering this and Hans for the solution. Please let us know if you still experience reprojection problems.

Excerpted from Thematic Mapping Blog.

My holiday project, apart from skiing, was to play with the new Natural Earth dataset. By combing raster and vector data you can make a variety of visually pleasing maps. You can use my Natural Earth Browser to study the great linework of Natural Earth.

We’re hoping to have the first rounds of edits made before Christmas and then another update in early Spring 2010. Edits are primarily focused so far in the populated places (towns), admin-0 (countries), and physical features (point labels). The Spring update will include an overhaul of our admin-1 features with better coding for thematic mapping.

Do you have data to contribute or have time to review the existing data for errors? Great! Possible data for future updates include transportation (roads and railroads), time zones, and terrestrial hypsography. Please reference our guidelines about creating new data. If you have ideas for Natural Earth or want to show how you’re using the data in the map gallery, please drop us a line.

So far we’ve had about 7,000 visitors, over 30,000 pageviews, and about 9,000 downloads (both a la cart and combo meal) from 95 ISO countries around the world. Our average time on site of 4 minutes. Please keep it coming!

Do you have a new theme to contribute to Natural Earth? Great! Please follow these data creation guidelines so it fits in with the rest of the project. Find an error? Log it via the Corrections system.

Why Create Natural Earth?

We have two goals:

First, to give cartographers an off-the shelf solution for creating small-scale world, regional, and country maps. To this end, Natural Earth Vector includes both cultural and physical features and builds on Tom Patterson’s Natural Earth raster data, first introduced in 2005.

Second, we include many features missing from people’s mental map of the world in the hope of improving overall geographic literacy.

Natural Earth Vector solves a problem that many NACIS members face: finding vector data for making publishable-quality small-scale maps. In a time when the web is awash in interactive maps and free, downloadable vector data, such as Digital Chart of the World and VMAP, mapmakers are forced to spend time sifting through a confusing tangle of poorly attributed data. Many cartographers working under tight project deadlines must use manually digitalized bases instead.

Small-scale map datasets of the world do exist, but they have their problems.

For example, most are crudely generalized—Chile’s fjords are a noisy mess, the Svalbard archipelago is a coalesced blob, and Hawaii has disappeared into the Pacific two million years ahead of schedule. They contain few data layers, usually only a coast and country polygons, which may not be in register with each other or modern satellite imagery. The lack of good small-scale map data is not surprising. Large mapping organizations that release public domain data, such as the US Geological Survey, are not mandated to create small-scale map data for a small user community that includes mapmaking shops, publishers, web mappers, academics, and students—in other words, typical NACIS members. Natural Earth Vector fills this oft-overlooked but important niche.

Collaboration

Making Natural Earth Vector is a collaboration involving many volunteer NACIS members. Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso and Tom Patterson began working on the project in late 2008. Following the path of least resistance, the idea was to repurpose existing data that we already had as an integrated world dataset at three map scales.

The 1:50 million and 1:110 million-scale data comes from bases developed by Dick Furno and additional staff at the Washington Post for quick turnaround newspaper mapping— the Washington Post Legal Department kindly granted us permission to use these data. The kernel for the 1:10 million data was a compilation by Patterson for the Physical Map of the World, consisting of coastlines, rivers, lakes, and physical feature labels. Expanding and improving on this foundation has been our chief activity.

The core team grew to include Tanya Buckingham, who coordinates data attributing by Ben Coakley, Kevin McGrath and Sarah Bennett at the University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab; Dick Furno as populated places guru; Nick Springer as the website developer; and Lou Cross as NACIS liaison.

A cast of consultants, many regulars on the Cartotalk.com discussion forum, assisted with place names for various world regions. They include Leo Dillon, Hans van der Maarel, Will Pringle, Craig Molyneaux, Melissa Katz-Moye, Laura McCormick, Scott Zillmer and fellow staff at XNR Mapping.

Data for cartography

We developed a world base map data suitable for making a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps. Unlike other map data intended for scientific analysis or military mapping, Natural Earth Vector is designed to meet the needs of mainstream production cartographers. Maximum flexibility was a goal. For example, Natural Earth Vector comes in ESRI shapefile format, the Geographic projection, and WGS datum, which are de facto standards for vector geodata.

Neatness counts with Natural Earth Vector. The carefully generalized linework maintains consistent, recognizable geographic shapes at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. As Natural Earth Vector was built from the ground up, 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 Vector, however, is more than just a collection of pretty lines. What lies beneath the surface, the data attributes, is equally important for mapmaking. Most data contain embedded feature names, which are ranked by relative importance. Up to eight rankings per data theme allow easy custom map “mashups” to emphasize your map’s subject while de-emphasizing reference features.

Other attributes facilitate faster map production. For example, width attributes assigned to rivers allow you to create tapered drainages with ease. Assigning different colors to contiguous country polygons is another task made easier thanks to data attribution.

Other key features:

• Vector feature include name attributes and scale ranks – know the Rocky Mountains are larger than the Ozarks.
• Large polygons, such as bathymetric layers, are split for more efficient data handling.
• Projection friendly—vectors precisely match at 180 degrees longitude. Lines contain enough data points for smooth bending in conic projections, but not so many that processing speed suffers.
• 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.
• Optimized for use in web mapping applications, such as Google, Yahoo, and OpenStreetMaps with built-in scale attributes to direct features to be shown at different tile zoom levels.

Data development

Since Natural Earth Vector is for visual mapmaking, we prepared the base layers in Adobe Illustrator in conjunction MAPublisher import and export filters. Illustrator offered us flexible tools for editing lines and polygons, organizing data on layers, and the ability to inspect the final data in a map-like form. A variety of third-party plug-in filters and scripts, some written by Kelso, were essential for linework generalization and other tasks.

World Data Bank 2 was the primary vector data source that required significant modifications. For example, we found that the entire west coast of the United States was about seven miles west of its true position and adjusted it accordingly. Slight adjustments to river positions better matched them to shaded relief derived from more satellite data. For Antarctica, we completely abandoned World Data Bank 2. Here, the coast, glaciers, and ice shelves derive from 2003-2004 NASA Mosaic of Antarctica, a MODIS product. We also updated the data to reflect recent ice shelf collapses.

Contributors from around the globe researched additional feature names beyond those original to Patterson’s Physical Map of the World. Attributing the data was performed in ArcGIS by the team at the University of Wisconsin and by Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso at The Washington Post.

Future activity

We regard the initial release of Natural Earth Vector as a starter dataset that will see periodic updates. With any project as complex as this, flaws and omissions are bound to emerge, requiring our attention. One proposal is to form a Natural Earth map data committee that will incorporate information from users, perhaps using a Wiki model, for coordinating updates. Rivers, lakes, cities, and first order admin are components still in need of refinement. Possible data for future updates include transportation (roads and railroads), time zones, and terrestrial hypsography.

If you have ideas for Natural Earth or want to show off how you’re using the data, please drop us a line.

Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso nathaniel@kelsocartography.com

Tom Patterson mtmaps@verizon.net

We won’t flood you with daily updates. Keep up to date with the RSS feed and know when a new post has been published.