Natural Earth Admin-1 States and Provinces as GeoJSON

GeoJSON polygons for the first-order administrative subdivisions of the world (states, provinces, regions and similar), taken from Natural Earth.

Column definitions and types are in datapackage.json.

Data

data/admin1.geojson is one GeoJSON FeatureCollection. Each feature is one subdivision, as a Polygon or MultiPolygon. The properties of each feature are the Natural Earth attributes, unchanged. The main ones are:

The other properties are Natural Earth map-drawing hints (for example scalerank, labelrank, min_label, max_label, mapcolor9). datapackage.json lists only the four main fields (name, admin, iso_3166_2, adm0_a3). Every property is in the file.

Admin-1 is the first level below the country. It is very different from country to country: in the United States of America it is the states, whereas in the United Kingdom it does not represent the inner countries (England, Scotland and so on). For more information, see the Natural Earth documentation or the table of administrative divisions by country.

Known limitations

• name is empty (null) for some features. Do not use it as a key.
• iso_3166_2 is always filled, but some values are Natural Earth placeholders rather than real ISO codes. They are used for disputed or special areas, for example SY-X01~ or -99-X16~. Real ISO codes look like AR-E.
• iso_3166_2 is not unique. Some codes appear on more than one feature, for example a city and the province around it, or several districts that carry the code of their region. Join on it with care.
• adm0_a3 is not always an ISO code (see the table), and iso_a2 is -1 for some disputed and special areas.
• Some properties are empty on many features (for example name_local, region, note).
• The data is the development version of Natural Earth, not a numbered release (see Preparation). The theme is also marked as beta on the Natural Earth download page.
• The licence of a few columns is unclear (see License).

Data sources

• Natural Earth, 10m Admin-1 States, Provinces: the polygons and the attributes. Licence: public domain under its terms of use.
• Wikidata, through Natural Earth: the name translations (name_*) and wikidataid. Licence: CC0, as stated by Natural Earth.
• A few columns come from other databases (GeoNames, WOE, US NGA GNS, HASC; and type_en, which Natural Earth's licensing note ties to GADM). Licence: unclear (see License).

Changes made to the source data: the file is downloaded from the Natural Earth repository and republished with one change: the top-level crs member is removed. All features and properties are otherwise unchanged.

Not endorsed by, or affiliated with, Natural Earth.

Preparation

The script needs Python 3 and the requests library. To rebuild data/admin1.geojson:

# Install libraries
pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt

# Update the data
python scripts/process.py

The script downloads ne_10m_admin_1_states_provinces.geojson from the master branch of the Natural Earth vector repository on GitHub. That branch is a development version, not a numbered release, so it can be ahead of the published releases.

A GitHub Actions workflow runs the script on the 1st of every month (and on pushes to main and on manual runs), and commits data/admin1.geojson if it changed.

License

Natural Earth's terms of use put its data in the public domain. They say: "No permission is needed to use Natural Earth. Crediting the authors is unnecessary." Commercial use is allowed. The name translations (name_*) come from Wikidata, which Natural Earth says is CC0.

Unclear: some columns. We could not establish the licence of the columns below. The data is published as is. Nothing has been removed.

• type_en. Natural Earth's own licensing note (a forum post from December 2009) says some admin-1 columns depend on GADM. It tells users who are worried about licensing to delete them. GADM's terms say: "Redistribution or commercial use is not allowed without prior permission." The post names three columns: the English type, "valid from" and "valid to". This file still has type_en. It does not have valid_from or valid_to. We found no later statement from Natural Earth or GADM that settles this.
• gn_name, woe_label and woe_name. These are text names taken from other databases (GeoNames and Yahoo/Flickr WOE). Natural Earth says the non-geometry attributes are "commonly available facts that are not copyrightable". Nobody has independently confirmed that for these columns. GeoNames publishes its database under CC BY 4.0.
• We did not read the terms for WOE, US NGA GNS or HASC data (the woe_*, gns_* and code_hasc columns). We make no claim about them.

The maintainers offer this package under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) 1.0. In plain words, that covers only what the maintainers add, and the parts that Natural Earth places in the public domain. It does not settle the unclear columns above.

All source code is licensed under the MIT licence.

See ATTRIBUTION.txt for the source credit and the change made to the source data.