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## Admin 1 – States, Provinces

Over 4,500 internal administrative divisions of countries

Natural Earth shows de facto boundaries by default according to who controls the territory, versus de jure. Adjusted to taste which boundaries are shown, hidden, and how they are rendered using the fclass_* properties paired with the POV worldview polygons above.

Download states and provinces (14.22 MB) version 5.1.1
Download as scale ranks (12.83 MB) version 5.1.1
Download without large lakes (14.36 MB) version 5.1.1
Download boundary lines (5.72 MB) version 5.1.0

About

NOTE: This theme is still in beta!

Internal, first-order administrative boundaries and polygons for all but a few tiny countries. Includes name attributes (including diacritical marks), name variants, and some statistical codes (FIPS, ISO, HASC).

Looking for Cyrillic or Chinese characters? The GeoDB format preserves local scripts better than SHP format.

Admin-0 units that lack admin-1:

Antarctica, some disputed areas, tiny island nations, and principalities such as Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein, and San Marino.

How-to

Use the following selection statement to derive this theme from the 10m lakes:

“ScaleRank” <=2

Then punch those selected features through the admin-1 and save result as a new feature class.

Issues

This is the toughest dataset to keep current. Unlike the United States, other countries constantly rearrange their admin-1 units, slicing and combining them on a regular basis.

We need help making sure our statistical codes are correct if they are present and about half the dataset needs them added, still.

Just a few admin-1 units lack a name. For names we are unsure about, those are flagged as an attribute.

A separate version should be created for “region” groupings of admin-1. Many countries, like France, include top level regions and departments, both as admin-1 ranking. If we only have their “region” admin-1, the department version needs to be digitized.

Boundaries should perfectly match the following NEV themes:

Coastline, lake shoreline, admin-0 country boundary, river and lake centerlines.

Some boundaries in Brazil, north Africa, and central Asia do not have enough data points on straight line segments. This is a concern when reprojecting the data. This is planned to be corrected in a 1.1 update.

Resources:

- UN SALB (list of National Mapping Agencies and their contacts)
- Berkeley GADM
- Institute of the Estonian Language (alternate link)
  Coordinating country for the UN GeoNames forums.
- Statoids
  Click on the ABCD images to find alphabetical listing of countries, then click into the country.
- Wikipedia
  Table_of_administrative_divisions_by_country
  List_of_country_subdivisions
  List_of_FIPS_region_codes
- GeoNames.org (example)
  Collects official gazetteer information from all countries in the world.

Version History

- 5.1.0
- 5.0.1
- 5.0.0
- 4.1.0
- 4.0.0
- 3.0.0
- 2.0.0
- 1.4.0
- 0.9.0
- 0.8.0

The master changelog is available on Github »

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 2:02 am and is filed under 10m-cultural-vectors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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1. Finding a Good Data Source For a World Map — vis4.net says:
   October 26, 2011 at 5:30 am

   […] of the earth (which I initially thought), but also provides detailed shapefiles. I checked the Admin 1 – States and Provinces shapefile and it contains South Sudan. And all data is licensed as public domain. That's not a […]