World Shoreline Boundary between Land and Ocean, 2014 (Intermediate-resolution)

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
This polygon shapefile represents the boundary between land and ocean, excluding Antarctica, at intermediate resolution. Intermediate represents an 80 percent reduction in size and quality from the high resolution layer. The Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography (GSHHG) Database is a high-resolution geography data set amalgamated from three data bases in the public domain. This layer is part of GSHHG Version 2.3.3. The World Vector Shorelines (WVS) is the basis for shorelines except for Antarctica while the CIA World Data Bank (WDBII) is the basis for lakes, although there are instances where differences in coastline representations necessitated adding WDBII islands to GSHHG. The WDBII source also provides all political borders and rivers. GSHHG data have undergone extensive processing and should be free of internal inconsistencies such as erratic points and crossing segments. Atlas of the Cryosphere (AC) provides the basis for Antarctica coastlines. The shorelines are constructed entirely from hierarchically arranged closed polygons.
Purpose
These shoreline polygon data can be used to simplify data searches and data selections and to study the statistical characteristics of shorelines and land-masses.

Description

Type of resource cartographic, software, multimedia
Form Shapefile
Extent 6.947
Place Springfield, Virginia, US
Publisher United States. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Publication date 2014
Edition 2.3.3
Language English
Digital origin born digital
Map data Scale not given. ; W 180°--E 180°/N 83°38ʹ--S 68°55ʹ11ʺ, Scale not given ; EPSG::4326

Creators/Contributors

Creator Wessel, Paul
Creator Smith, Walter H. F.

Subjects

Subject Shorelines
Subject Earth
Subject 2014
Subject Oceans
Subject Boundaries
Genre Geospatial data
Genre Cartographic dataset

Bibliographic information

Supplemental information

GSHHG used to be called GSHHS (Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shorelines) but since rivers and political boundaries were also included we changed it to GSHHG starting with version 2.2.1.
The addition of AC since 2.3.0 allows two choices for Antarctica coastlines: Ice-front or Grounding line. These are encoded as levels 5 and 6, respectively.
Location https://purl.stanford.edu/ds959rc3867

Access conditions

Use and reproduction

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. http://www.gnu.org/licenses.

Copyright
Copyright resides with the originator.

Preferred citation

Wessel, P., and W. H. F. Smith (2014). World Shoreline Boundary between Land and Ocean, 2014 (Intermediate-resolution). (v. 2.3.3). United States. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Available at http://purl.stanford.edu/ds959rc3867.

Collection

A global, self-consistent, hierarchical, high-resolution shoreline database

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