Free For All – Natural Earth Data

It has been a while since I featured a collection of free vector and raster files, so let’s reverse that trend this month. The folks at Natural Earth Data have a very nice collection of free GIS data that is both easy to download and also offered in various scales. This collection of free data is pretty self explanatory so let me give our readers a sense of what you can download in either small, medium or large scale:

A sample of the large-scale Natural Earth 1 with Shaded Relief dataset (no water is included in this version) over the Midwest of the United States.

Cultural Layers
- Country boundaries and administrative units
- Disputed areas
- Populated places
- Railroads
- Airports
- Ports
- Urban areas
- Parks and protected lands
- Timezones
Physical
- Coastline
- Land masses
- Minor islands
- Reefs
- Ocean
- Rivers and lakes
- Major physical features
- Playas
- Ice shelves and glaciers
- Bathymetry
- Worldwide color and grey-scale raster backgrounds