Natural Earth

Normally, I would not re-post information from another blog especially one written so recently.  However, this post was great (it is also a great open source GIS blog!)  The post describes the Natural Earth website: it provides free vector and raster data sets at several different scales for the entire Earth.  Generally speaking, there are three categories of data: cultural and physical vector data and raster data sets.

The data can be loaded into any GIS software.  Below, I have loaded raster data for elevation and a shaded relief into Quantum GIS (or QGIS), which I will talk about in later postings.  The layers are both pleasing to the eye and not excessively large in terms of file size.  Obviously, the larger the scale, the more detail, and the larger the files will be.

Clicking on the image above will bring up a larger view in a new window.