I was working on a map­ping project, and I was frus­trated that I couldn’t find basic shore­line data for the Great Lakes. You wouldn’t think it would be hard to get some­thing as simple as an out­line of the most famous fresh water in the world, but it is: Geobase​.ca for instance only covers half of the lakes because Geobase stops where Canada stops. Even if Geobase were inter­na­tional in scope, the National Hydro dataset on offer is insanely detailed and would have to be mosaiced and fil­tered and smoothed and gen­er­al­ized before being used to make a regional-​​scale map. Alternatively, there are a few clunky world base­layers floating around, but zoomed into a regional scale they look like they were dig­i­tized by an intern in a hurry. finder​.geo​com​mons​.com (bless ‘em) has all kinds of inter­esting spe­cial­ized prod­ucts — Fishing Special Regulation Lakes in Pennsylvania for instance — but not just, you know, a decent map of all the lakes.

Nor is this an unusual problem. General basemap data is rare. High quality, con­sis­tent, freely avail­able, freely pub­lish­able basemap data is even rarer. Quality, con­sis­tent, usable basemap data that is pre­dictably find­able is gold. ESRI gives away some low-​​res, some­what incon­sis­tent free data, and will sell you a pretty com­pre­hen­sive set of higher quality stuff. But in my expereience the quality of even the paid data varies like crazy from juris­dic­tion to juris­dic­tion, and often doesn’t match up at the bor­ders. Each mapper I know has a little stash of their favourite basemaps, and some­times they will get traded around, and some­times they won’t. And that still doesn’t solve your problem if you’re trying to make a map that looks con­sis­tent across mul­tiple provinces or states or countries.

(I should point out that nor­mally, access to Great Lakes would be an excep­tion, since gis​.glin​.net is a good GIS source. But they’re broken these days).

If you want a nice tinted relief map of the world, that at least has been avail­able thanks to the work and gen­erosity of Tom Patterson, USGS car­tog­ra­pher and acknowl­edged master of shaded relief and nat­u­ral­istic car­tog­raphy. And for a while there have been hints that Tom was par­tic­i­pating in a new project that would release a broader set of basemap data, including high-​​quality vector data as well as raster layers. Wouldn’t that be a thing!

So I decided to check in on the progress of that project. And lo, it has been released! Since last week! Natural Earth is online and dis­trib­uting data.

What’s in there? An extra­or­di­nary car­to­graph­ical toolkit — phys­ical and cul­tural, hand-​​generalized to 3 dif­ferent useful scales. Checked for accu­racy and con­sis­tency. Comprehensive across the world. With an active infra­struc­ture for gath­ering reported errors and plans to revise and rere­lease improved iter­a­tions. Free as in beer, free as in speech. You don’t even have to sign in. And as if all that wasn’t enough, Tom Patterson seems to have included a new port­folio of shaded relief layers, including some gor­geous hyp­so­metric tinted land­cover rep­re­sen­ta­tions.

In addi­tion to Tom, the other dri­ving col­lab­o­rator seems to be one Nathaniel Kelso, someone I didn’t know of but who works for the Washington Post. Apparently the kernel of the vector side of Natural Earth is a dataset the Washington Post had assem­bled for quick-​​turn-​​around dia­gra­matic car­tog­raphy. I’m not quite clear on the funding of the project, but as far as I can tell the moti­va­tion is sheer good will. It’s an unex­pected and extremely promising car­tog­raphy resource.