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nvkelso / natural-earth-vector

A global, public domain map dataset available at three scales and featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data.
https://www.naturalearthdata.com/
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data only available for the united states #738

Open gismatthew opened 2 years ago

gismatthew commented 2 years ago

Why is this?

nvkelso commented 2 years ago

Hi @gismatthew, can you tell me more about your use case?

The data for 10m cultural vector admin-1-states-and-provinces has a high maintenance burden – the USA is unusual in that it's admin-1 are mostly stable thru time while almost all other countries have significant churn year to year and it's hard to keep up.

To reduce that burden, and based on population and area thresholds a small subset of countries have internal subdivisions in the 1:50m theme (which was recently expanded in v5.0.0). I can see adding 3 to 5 more countries to 1:110m theme but there the countries subdivisions need to be very large geographically to make sense at that very small scale.

gismatthew commented 2 years ago

Thanks @nvkelso ! Obviously I really didn't seriously consider the amount of effort you guys put in maintaining such an amazing dataset on the internet! Even though I'm a GIS professional.

...I was wondering if someone accidentally messed up the release so I checked previous versions but still no luck. However, I noticed a note saying that that dataset is only for the US.

Suggestion: I think it would be helpful to put a note on the download page so naive users like myself know what that particular data actually is, esp. its footprint/coverage.

My use case: My project focuses on the Arctic regions. Part of my online visualization needs to show the 9 high-latitude countries and their states/provinces. Of course 10m_admin1 fits my need, but I want to reduce the file size, or simply geometries, to ensure my web app's performance (I plan to use the vector format for the frontend for better interactivity). Because I like the simplified presentation found in NE's small-scale products, I was trying to find admin1 data at small scales (50m, or better 110m). Of course I later figured there was no such product. Then I tried to simplify 10m_admin1 myself, using topojson.simplify() in NodeJS but the result is not as natural/beautiful as NE's product. Can you explain how you guys simplify your spatial layers? Thanks again for your prompt response!

nvkelso commented 2 years ago

Try running the 10m theme thru mapshaper?