Natural Earth v2.0.0 RC2 Data Release
Some nice work by Kelso’s Corner - nice data clean up and
2.0.0 release focuses on 6 major areas and is available to download as preview release candidate 2.
- Economic geography: added global roads, railroads, ports, and airports to show how people are interconnected and routes goods move.
- Remastered geometries: fixed topological errors at 1:10 to 1:1,000 scales in the basic coastline, ocean, land, admin-0, and admin-1 related themes. By removing self-intersections, sliver polygons, and adjusting offset polygons, Natural Earth will import into more GIS software (like PostGIS) and be easier to maintain. The coastline was also adjusted to better conform to ~1:3,000,000 satellite imagery. Because of all these changes, some raster themes were also updated.
- New file name and field name schemas. Full adoption of ne_10m_theme_name.shp file names with `ne_` prefix to allow better import into GeoDB and PostGIS storage, lowercase field (column) names instead of MiXeD and UPPER cased names, and use of consistent `name` field (versus name1).
- Address user submitted bug reports, ~20 since the 1.4 release.
- Moved to Github for the backend versioned file management and coordination.
- Adopt semantic versioning. Know, by theme, if new changes in Natural Earth affect your project.
See below for more information.
