Remastering Natural Earth - Tom Patterson, US National Park Service, Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso

Remastering Natural Earth
Tom Patterson, US National Park Service (retired), Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Snap Inc.
Natural Earth did not develop according to a grand plan. It started off with World Databank 2 coastlines, rivers, and lakes dating from the 1970s. And things then grew from there. To put Natural Earth on a firmer foundation, we are rebuilding it from modern data sources and using the latest generalization methods. The new 1: 10 million-scale data will have slightly more detail than the previous version and will be chock-full of attributes. The remastering effort will take a couple of years to complete. Although a possible new data source could speed up the work considerably.