World country boundaries at 1:110m scale from Natural Earth, the public domain reference basemap maintained by NACIS. Republished as cloud-native GeoParquet alongside the original zipped Shapefile.
Natural Earth is the public domain
reference map dataset that Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso and Tom Patterson
started in 2009 and maintain with volunteer cartographers under
NACIS. This collection carries its 1:110m countries
theme, version 5.1.1 from May 2022, and holds 177 country polygons with
171 attribute columns of names in 26 languages, ISO codes, population
and GDP estimates from 2019, and cartographic styling hints. It is the
geometry behind world-atlas
and with that most of the world choropleths on the web.
Boundaries follow Natural Earth's
de facto policy,
showing who controls territory rather than legal claims, so Somaliland
and Northern Cyprus appear as their own rows. The 34 FCLASS point-of-view
columns added in December 2021 let a map follow a specific national
worldview instead.
Agents, read AGENTS.md first. It carries the join keys,
the sentinel-value traps, and tested queries.
Quick Start
The data asset is GeoParquet 2.0 with a native geometry type and a covering bbox column, so it needs a GeoPandas built on pyarrow 24 or newer. DuckDB spatial queries the same file in place, see AGENTS.md for those patterns. Paths are relative to this directory, and the same code works against the published URL.
Schema, the Columns That Matter
Twenty-two of the 171 columns do most of the work.
Column
Type
Description
SOVEREIGNT
varchar
The owning sovereign state, which differs from ADMIN for territories such as Greenland (Denmark).
TYPE
varchar
Unit type, Sovereign country, Country, Dependency, Disputed, Indeterminate, or Sovereignty.
ADM0_A3
varchar
Natural Earth's own three-letter country code. Never a sentinel value, and the join key to the populated places Collection.
NAME
varchar
Short map label, for example Dem. Rep. Congo.
NAME_LONG
varchar
Long-form name, for example Democratic Republic of the Congo. Differs from NAME on 21 rows.
POP_EST
double
Population estimate, mostly the 2019 vintage. See POP_YEAR.
POP_YEAR
integer
Year the population estimate refers to.
GDP_MD
integer
GDP in millions of US dollars, mostly the 2019 vintage. See GDP_YEAR.
The table has 171 columns in all. The full list with types lives in table:columns on the collection.
Join Statistics to Geometry
The reason this Collection is in the catalog. Any table keyed by ISO
country code joins here for mapping, like the Eurostat electricity
prices table two directories over. Join on ISO_A2_EH or ISO_A3_EH,
not the raw ISO columns, which hold -99 for France and Norway.
Suggested Uses
Choropleths of ISO-coded statistics, continent and region rollups, and
quick spatial-query demos. The MAPCOLOR7 through MAPCOLOR13 columns
assign map colors so neighboring countries differ, and LABEL_X and
LABEL_Y carry hand-placed label points, both there for basemap
rendering.
Limitations
Not authoritative for legal boundaries. Natural Earth draws de facto
control, so Crimea, Kashmir, and Western Sahara follow the situation on
the ground, not treaties. Not measurement geometry either. At 1:110m a
coastline is simplified by tens of kilometres, and 43 small countries
and territories, from Andorra and Malta to Singapore and the Vatican,
have no polygon at all. Population and GDP are 2019 estimates. Upstream
publishes no formal accuracy figures, and the last cultural release was
in May 2022.
