About

Sovereign states: (above) France and it’s territories.

There are fewer sovereign states than ISO country codes. Sovereign States do not distinguish between the metropolitan and semi-independent portions of a state or it’s constituent countries. Passports are issued by sovereign states, not countries.

Map units: (above) the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom – England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Not usually useful but some FIPS and ISO codes refer to groups of individual admin-0 territories by these designations. US Pacific Island Territories, French Guiana, and more. PeakBagger has a good overview of dependencies.

Map subunits: Above: Alaska and United States (lower 48 states + the District of Columbia).

Countries subdivided by non-contiguous units. Mainland metropolitan France separate from the island of Corsica. These rarely correspond to actual administrative divisions but rather highlight geographical regions that are not continuous but are part of the same country.

Scale ranks: Above: Islands of Indonesia (smallest islands exaggerated).

Smallest base unit where multipart polygons per each admin-0 feature is broken apart and given individual scale ranks.

Disclaimer

Natural Earth Vector draws boundaries of sovereign states according to defacto status. We show who actually controls the situation on the ground. For instance, we show China and Taiwan as two separate states. But we show Palestine as part of Israel. Please feel free to mashup our countries and disputed areas themes to match your particular political outlook.

How-to

Export all rows for the map subunits. For map units, remove the level=4 rows. For countries, remove the level=3 and level=4 rows. For sovereignty, remove the level=2, level=3, level=4 units AND remove type=Dependency and type=Lease and type=Country. For each of the resulting tables, join with the geometry in the SHPs. The SHPs build up by dissolving based on the corresponding column in the scaleRanks file. The scaleRanks file is in turn generated by removing the rank 7 and 8 islands.

Issues

None known.

Version History

• 5.1.1
• 5.1.0
• 5.0.1
• 5.0.0
• 4.1.0
• 4.0.0
• 3.1.0
• 3.0.0
• 2.0.0
• 1.4.0

The master changelog is available on Github »