Building maps with Natural Earth data

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Quoting from the website: “Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.”

In this section we are going to progressively build maps based on the above dataset.