In some areas, especially the south Pacific, we often need to show maritime boundaries, but neither of the maritime layers in natural earth (pacific groupings and maritime indicators) is really authoritative. Particularly, the rectangular lines we’re used to seeing on maps of the pacific are pure imagination. Official treaty lines (both territorial waters and EEZ’s) for many of these boundaries exist, and I’m always surprised that they are not used more often.
There are a variety of sources, most of which are proprietary, but I just found a free dataset from the Flanders Marine Institute in Belgium:
http://www.vliz.be/vmdcdata/marbound/
The licensing is a bit unclear; on the same page they say it’s open source, and that they require permission and attribution. Perhaps someone can contact them and see if they will contribute it to NE.
A follow up. I’m comparing these layers, and I can see that NE’s maritime indicators layer is a partial extract from the authoritative maritime boundaries. Sorry about the accusation. Still, why not offer the complete EEZ boundaries as an option, rather than the Pacific Groupings?
@BPlewe: A generalized, 1:10m appropriate EEZ boundary was originally included in Natural Earth 1.0 but were removed at the request of the Flanders Marine Institute (the source before the linework was simplified for consistency with the rest of the NE linework and the attributes were simplified). Their licensing terms, as you point out, are contradictory. If you look in the notes section / “More Info” resources area, we actually link to them. Natural Earth does retain the maritime boundary “indicator” but not the full set. Regarding the Pacific Grouping Lines, those are useful when making maps at small scale and prob. should only be used with 110m and 50m scale maps, but remains included in NE for reference.
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