Natural Earth Vector and Raster Tiles

naturalearthtiles.org provides prerendered vector and raster tiles for Natural Earth.

The vector tiles are encoded in the Mapbox vector tile specification for use with Mapbox GL or other clients and consist of carefully curated layers from the cultural and physical data sets.

The raster tiles are made from the Natural Earth Raster TIF files and are ideal as base layer or shading for your base maps.

🌐 Check the demo at naturalearthtiles.org

📂 Download the vector and raster tiles from the releases page.

For high zoom level vector tiles please checkout our project to create vector tiles from Open Street Map.

Use Vector Tiles

You can use mbview to take a look at the MBTiles vector tiles locally. To display the vector tiles with Mapbox GL you need a tileserver.

Tileservers:

• tessera
• tileserver-gl-light
• tileserver-gl

Run Workflow

The entire project is structured components using Docker containers to work together. Ensure you meet the prerequisites.

• Install Docker
• Install Docker Compose

By default you will use the containers published to DockerHub. You can also build the containers yourself with make. Start up the PostgreSQL database with the PostGIS extension.

docker-compose up -d postgres

Now import the Natural Earth data set (can take several minutes).

docker-compose run import-naturalearth

Import the required database schema (views, prepared tables and helper functions).

docker-compose run db-schema

Export the vector tiles for the planet (can take up to 15min). The exported vector tiles are stored in data/natural_earth.mbtiles.

docker-compose run export-vectortiles

To visualize and work with the vector tiles you can spin up Mapbox Studio in a Docker container and visit localhost:3000.

docker-compose up mapbox-studio

The raster tiles are exported directly from Mapbox Studio from the raster-datasource. This process is not automated yet.

License

The produced vector and raster tiles are made available under the Public Domain Dedication and License v1.0 whose full text can be found at: http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/.

The source code is Copyright (c) Lukas Martinelli under BSD-3 as defined in License. The vector data source in src/vector-data-source is partially derived from mapbox/natural-earth-tm2 and therefore retains Copyright (c) Mapbox under BSD-3 as defined in License.