Credits
Built on open data
Geographys wouldn't exist without the people who publish these datasets for free. Here's what we use, what for, and under which licence.
Cities and towns and their populations, currencies, languages, time zones and land borders.
We filtered, reformatted and added to the data, and fixed a few gaps by hand (for example Kosovo's calling code).
City populations in the city quizzes and Radar.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. We matched its cities to GeoNames places and, outside China, keep a city's own figure where the UN's is smaller. Germany's cities use Destatis's estimates.
Country populations (World Development Indicators, total population, most recent year).
Taiwan and Vatican City aren't in the World Bank series, so those two populations come from national sources (Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior and the Holy See). The UK nations use the ONS, NRS and NISRA mid-2022 estimates and French Guiana the INSEE 2021 census.
Country borders and coastlines on the maps and globe, packaged as TopoJSON by world-atlas, plus the map-unit outlines of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and French Guiana, and the states, provinces and regions on the country maps.
world-atlas by Mike Bostock is released under the ISC licence. We draw Crimea as part of Ukraine, as the UN General Assembly does, where Natural Earth draws it inside Russia. To Scale measures most country maps' areas on these outlines; Germany's, Poland's and Argentina's are the official Destatis, GUS and INDEC figures.
The lines between Northern Ireland's six counties on the UK & Ireland maps.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, Land & Property Services). We cut Natural Earth's outline of Northern Ireland with them and simplified the result.
Detailed outlines of Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino and the other microstates in To Scale, and of small territories like Gibraltar, Bermuda and the Isle of Man.
Runfola et al. (2020), geoBoundaries. Each outline keeps its source licence: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0), Wikimedia Commons (public domain or CC BY 2.5), Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority (ODbL 1.0) and, for the territories, ESA Sentinel-2 land cover (CC BY 4.0). We simplified them.
The outlines of Macau, Jeju, Saint Martin, Loch Ness, Lake Tahoe, Lake Geneva and Lake Balaton in To Scale.
© OpenStreetMap contributors. Macau is its boundary cut along the coastline; Saint Martin is the island with Simpson Bay Lagoon filled in. We simplified them.
US Census Bureau
Public domainUS state areas in To Scale, and the state boundaries on the US maps (packaged as TopoJSON by us-atlas).
us-atlas by Mike Bostock is released under the ISC licence.
The country outlines in the shape games.
Cropped and recoloured; a few missing countries are drawn from Natural Earth instead.
Country names, ISO codes, regions, alternate spellings and areas.
Flagpedia
Public domainFlag images, served from flagcdn.com.
The Canary Islands, Azores, Madeira, Easter Island, Galápagos, San Andrés, Rodrigues, Jeju, Okinawa, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Bonaire, Fernando de Noronha, Balearic Islands, Orkney, Shetland, Mount Athos, Baikonur, Ceuta and Melilla flags, and Afghanistan's current flag, come from Wikimedia Commons.
Satellite imagery in North Up.
Imagery: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community.
Data from these sources is used here in processed form and may contain errors we introduced. If you spot something wrong, tell us through the feedback form.