The Natural Earth dataset was originally created in 2008 by Tom Patterson and Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso. At the time, they discovered a lack of high-quality, consistent, and easy-to-use geographic information data for their work. So they decided to create a global, free, and open geographic information dataset, which is the origin of the Natural Earth dataset.
Tom Patterson is a renowned map maker and geographic information expert whose work is used in education, publishing, government, and business. He has produced maps for National Geographic, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Park Service, and others, and has published several papers on map making and geographic information science.
tom paterson
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso is a GIS expert who has worked as a GIS analyst and geographic information scientist for agencies such as the US Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He is also a map making enthusiast and has created many exquisite map works.
TwitterFacebookNatural Earth website
Currently, the Natural Earth dataset is a free and open geographic information dataset maintained and updated by a team of geographic information system (GIS) experts and volunteers. The dataset aims to provide high-quality, consistent and easy-to-use geographic information data for map making, environmental research, urban planning, natural resource management and other fields on a global scale. The Natural Earth dataset consists of several different datasets, including vector and raster data.
Vector data includes various geographic information such as administrative boundaries, coastlines, rivers, lakes, mountains, landmarks, population density, etc. The data is provided in Shapefile and GeoJSON formats, which are compatible with many GIS software. Raster data includes various terrain and oceanographic data, such as elevation, slope, mountains, and ocean depth. These data are provided in GeoTIFF format.
The Natural Earth dataset contains data of 3 different scales, namely 1:10 million, 1:50 million, and 1:110 million.
Natural Earth vectors are in the ESRI shapefile format, the de facto standard for vector geographic data. The character encoding is UTF-8, and the Natural Earth Raster is in TIFF format, with a TFW world file.
This time, Wang Shitou downloaded the most detailed 1:10 million raster dataset. Coordinate system: WGS84; Resolution: 21600*10800;
It can be found that the resolution is already very high, and when loaded into the QGIS software, the interface is as follows:
HYP_HR_SR_W
HYP_LR_SR_W_DR
HYP_HR_SR_W_DR
HYP_HR_SR_OB_DR
HYP_HR
At first glance, there may be no difference. In fact, each raster data has different shades of ocean, atmosphere, and texture to meet the needs of different scenes. In addition, there are monochromatic shadow terrains, so I won’t go into detail here. , you can go to the official website to find out by yourself.
Official website screenshot 1
Official website screenshot 2
Official website screenshot 3
In addition to providing high-quality, consistent, and easy-to-use data, the Natural Earth dataset has other advantages. First, the dataset is highly accurate and complete, providing users with all the information they need to create high-quality maps and visualizations. Second, the conditions for using the Natural Earth dataset are very loose, and users are free to use and share the data without paying or applying for authorization. In addition, the dataset supports multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, etc.