NaturalEarth.jl

This package provides a Julia interface to the Natural Earth dataset. The Natural Earth dataset is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. It is ideal for small-scale thematic mapping and for creating static maps and illustrations.

Currently, this package provides a single function, naturalearth, which fetches any .geojson file from this repository. The function returns a GeoJSON.FeatureCollection object.

The data is downloaded on demand and cached using Julia's scratch space system. This means that the first time you fetch a dataset, it will take a while to download, and you will need an internet connection. Subsequent calls will be much faster, even in a new session.

Quick start

You can install the Natural Earth package through the Julia package manager: using Pkg; Pkg.add("NaturalEarth"). The main entry point is the naturalearth(dataset, [scale]) function which returns a GeoJSON.FeatureCollection from GeoJSON.jl.

using NaturalEarth
naturalearth("admin_0_countries", 110) # this resolves to `ne_110m_admin_0_countries.geojson`
naturalearth("10m_admin_0_countries")  # this gets the 10m-scale, but explicitly

These return GeoJSON.FeatureCollections, which you can either use as-is or convert to DataFrames (by DataFrame(naturalearth(...))).

Acknowledgements

All datasets are provided by Natural Earth.

Initial development by Haakon Ludvig Langeland Ervik