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Natural Earth
Natural Earth, with the North American Cartographic Information Society
- Licence
- Public domain
- Credit
- None required
- Changed here
- Countries, states and provinces and town names are the 1:50m set; lakes and rivers are 1:10m. Every outline is thinned. The lakes are the 500 biggest, measured on the sphere, with any bay that is part of a bigger lake joined to it. Only rivers that reach a lake are kept, and the stretch across the lake is left out. The ocean floor picture, made from CleanTOPO2, is drawn as it comes.
- Drawn in
- Country borders, Ocean, States and provinces, Lakes, Rivers, Ocean floor
- Where to find it
- https://www.naturalearthdata.com/
GeoNames: cities with a population over 15,000
GeoNames
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Credit
- City names, places and populations from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0.
- Changed here
- Every city of a state with 25,000 people or more, each named from a zoom set by how many live there. The roads drawn between them are the Census Bureau's.
- Drawn in
- Cities and roads
- Where to find it
- https://www.geonames.org/
Cartographic boundary files: counties
U.S. Census Bureau
- Licence
- Public domain
- Credit
- None required
- Changed here
- The 2023 county outlines at 1:20,000,000, thinned.
- Drawn in
- US counties, and the county every member of the site is placed in
- Where to find it
- https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/cartographic-boundary.html
TIGER/Line primary and secondary roads
U.S. Census Bureau
- Licence
- Public domain
- Credit
- None required
- Changed here
- The interstates, US highways and state routes of a state, kept only where a route runs from one city to the next: the stretch between two cities that are neighbours along it, and nothing else. Thinned lightly and rounded, so a road reads as a curve rather than a run of straight chords.
- Drawn in
- Cities and roads
- Where to find it
- https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html
Geographic Names Information System, 2021 archive
U.S. Geological Survey
- Licence
- Public domain
- Credit
- None required
- Changed here
- The courthouse buildings, matched to their counties. A courthouse more than ten miles from its county seat is not used.
- Drawn in
- The mark on each US county's courthouse
- Where to find it
- https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis
Wikidata
Wikimedia Foundation and Wikidata contributors
- Licence
- CC0 1.0
- Credit
- None required
- Changed here
- County seats, and courthouses with a coordinate, where the gazetteer above has none. Mountains, summits and volcanoes with a name, a height and a place, kept where they stand above the treeline at their latitude. And the buildings of each city's skyline: the height where one is recorded and the floors where it is not, at three and a half metres a storey. Only what stands within a mile or two of the tallest building of a city is kept, so a transmitter mast out of town is not drawn as an office block.
- Drawn in
- The mark on each US county's courthouse, Mountain peaks, and the skylines in Cities and roads
- Where to find it
- https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Licensing
Terrain Tiles
Mapzen, now a Linux Foundation project, on the Registry of Open Data on AWS
- Licence
- Each source's own, listed below
- Changed here
- Heights read at about 10 km a square for the world and 5 km for the lower 48, and kept in 40 m steps. The elevation and depth rings are traced from those. The terrain rings are not traced: they are smooth curves laid on a surface through the heights, and the landforms are shapes fitted to the rings, so the tiles are a guide to both rather than a copy.
- Drawn in
- Elevation, Ocean depth, Elevation rings, Depth rings, Terrain rings, the relief in Soil fertility and Fertility rings, and the landforms
- Where to find it
- https://registry.opendata.aws/terrain-tiles/
Credits, by source
| Source | Credit |
|---|---|
| 3DEP | 3DEP data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey |
| SRTM | SRTM data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey |
| GMTED2010 | GMTED2010 data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey |
| ETOPO1 | DOC/NOAA/NESDIS/NCEI > National Centers for Environmental Information, NESDIS, NOAA, U.S. Department of Commerce |
| LINZ | Copyright 2011 Crown copyright (c) Land Information New Zealand and the New Zealand Government. All rights reserved |
| UK LIDAR | © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2015. All rights reserved. |
| DGM Österreich | © offene Daten Österreichs – Digitales Geländemodell (DGM) Österreich. |
| Kartverket | © Kartverket |
| ArcticDEM | DEM(s) were created from DigitalGlobe, Inc., imagery and funded under National Science Foundation awards 1043681, 1559691, and 1542736. |
| EU-DEM | Produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union - EU-DEM layers. |
| CDEM | Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada. |
| INEGI | Source: INEGI, Continental relief, 2016 |
| Geoscience Australia | © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2017. |
SoilGrids 2.0
ISRIC – World Soil Information
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Credit
- SoilGrids © ISRIC – World Soil Information. Poggio, L. et al. (2021). SoilGrids 2.0: producing soil information for the globe with quantified spatial uncertainty. SOIL 7, 217–240.
- Changed here
- Clay, sand, silt and the soil group read at about 2.4 km and folded into squares of about 10 km: the shares averaged, the group voted on. Texture classes and soil groups settled and traced as outlines, and combined with climate and relief into the fertility bands.
- Drawn in
- Topsoil texture, Soil groups, Soil fertility, Fertility rings, and which grass grows where
- Where to find it
- https://soilgrids.org/
Köppen-Geiger climate classification maps
Beck, H.E. et al., GloH2O
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Credit
- Beck, H.E. et al. (2023). High-resolution (1 km) Köppen-Geiger maps for 1901–2099 based on CMIP6 projections. Scientific Data 10, 724.
- Changed here
- The present-day map at 0.1°, folded into squares of about 10 km by vote, settled and traced as outlines.
- Drawn in
- Climate zones, Soil fertility, Fertility rings
- Where to find it
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02549-6
Blue Marble: Next Generation
NASA Earth Observatory
- Licence
- Not subject to copyright in the United States
- Credit
- NASA Earth Observatory. NASA asks to be acknowledged as the source.
- Changed here
- The plain monthly pictures for January, April, July and October 2004, at 5,400 by 2,700 pixels, with no relief shading. Each map square takes the pixel its middle falls on, and the coarser levels are the mean of four.
- Drawn in
- Satellite, January; Satellite, April; Satellite, July; Satellite, October; Ground texture, which reads the season's picture
- Where to find it
- https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/blue-marble-next-generation/base-map/
Ecoregions 2017
Resolve
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Credit
- Ecoregions 2017 © Resolve. Dinerstein, E. et al. (2017). An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting Half the Terrestrial Realm. BioScience 67(6), 534–545.
- Changed here
- Biomes and realms traced as outlines, with rock and ice made a biome of its own. Tree and grass cover worked out for each biome and blurred across the edges between them.
- Drawn in
- Trees and grass, Grass, Biome ground, Blended ground, and the plants drawn on the map
- Where to find it
- https://ecoregions.appspot.com/
Radio Browser
the Radio Browser community
- Licence
- Public domain (CC0)
- Credit
- None required
- Changed here
- Only stations whose transmitter has a position are kept, and only those whose stream is https and answered the catalogue's last check -- an http stream cannot be played from this site at all. The most listened to are taken first, at most ten to a country, and the list of stream hosts is capped: every host is named in this site's security policy, and a station on a host past the cap is left out. Each station keeps its position, its stream, its bitrate and one tag. The circle drawn round it is not this source's: it is one distance for every station, the same everywhere, because real coverage depends on power, mast, terrain and band, and none of that is published here.
- Drawn in
- Radio stations, and the radio carried on the map
- Where to find it
- https://www.radio-browser.info/
World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions
Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG)
- Licence
- A TDWG standard; no licence is stated
- Credit
- Brummitt, R. K. (2001). World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions, edition 2. Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, for TDWG.
- Changed here
- The 369 level 3 botanical countries painted onto a ten-kilometre grid, each spread a few squares past its coast so a plant on a beach stands in a region, and traced as outlines. Nothing on the map draws them.
- Drawn in
- Where each tree, shrub, grass and flower is drawn: only in the regions its species is native to
- Where to find it
- https://github.com/tdwg/wgsrpd
World Checklist of Vascular Plants
the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Credit
- Govaerts, R., Nic Lughadha, E., Black, N., Turner, R. and Paton, A. (2021). The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity. Scientific Data 8, 215. Plants of the World Online, facilitated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
- Changed here
- Kept in the map library as the reference the species' native ranges are written in the regions of. The ranges drawn today were written by hand and have not yet been checked against it.
- Drawn in
- Nothing yet
- Where to find it
- https://powo.science.kew.org/
IP to City Lite
DB-IP
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Credit
- IP Geolocation by DB-IP
- Changed here
- IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, each range kept as a place rounded to about a kilometre and its country, with neighbouring ranges that place the same joined; an IPv6 range by its first 64 bits. It is read on this server and only to choose where a visitor who has not signed in first stands; the address is not sent anywhere and not kept.
- Drawn in
- Where a new visitor first stands on the world map: the County Market nearest them
- Where to find it
- https://db-ip.com
Airports
OurAirports
- Licence
- Public domain
- Credit
- Airports from OurAirports (ourairports.com), in the public domain.
- Changed here
- Only the airports with scheduled airline service and a three-letter code on a ticket, seaplane bases included and heliports left out: each kept as its code, name, the town it serves, its size and its place.
- Drawn in
- Where the people on the world map fly from and to, on a trip between markets too long to drive
- Where to find it
- https://ourairports.com/data/
Primary and secondary roads
US Census Bureau, TIGER/Line 2024
- Licence
- Public domain
- Credit
- Roads from the US Census Bureau TIGER/Line Shapefiles, in the public domain.
- Changed here
- The interstates, US highways and state routes of every state, joined into one network between the county courthouses of the country and thinned for drawing; of that, only the least road joining the County Markets is drawn.
- Drawn in
- The roads on the world trade map, between the County Markets
- Where to find it
- https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html
Made here
From the sources above, by this site.
The terrain rings, the landforms, the fertility bands, the grass and the plant species — which plant grows in which biome and on which soil group — are this site's own drawings. None of them is a survey, and none should be read as one.