I just recently learned of this great resource. I do have some follow up questions though. The Coastline and Land data seem to be exactly the same, except that the former contains polylines and the latter contains polygons. Would be useful if that was stated on the website somewhere unless I missed it.
Also, noticed that none of the shapefiles have metadata. Its an XML file with the entire background, stats, and info related to the feature set. I think that would also be very useful so that users can tell right off the bat what each dataset contains.
AGP
@Sindizzy: Glad you’re enjoying Natural Earth. While we do not offer XML metadata, each theme has a data description page on this website. In the main download list, there is an “About | Issues | Version History ยป” link as part of each theme. Clicking on that would bring up a page like: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-physical-vectors/10m-coastline/. You get what you pay for with Natural Earth. Metadata is a slave-level job (really) for someone to produce on top of basic features you’re already getting for free. The release notes shown on the blog each dot increase detail major changes between versions.
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