High-resolution worlwide coastlines, rivers and borders

This contribution provides high-resolution data, in *.mat format, of the spatial coordinates (latitude and longitude) of geographic borders

MatLab software contains a built-in dataset of the world coastline coordinates; namely, a file with the latitudes and longitudes (expressed in decimal degrees) of about 10000 points on the world shorelines. In particular, the file is named "coastlines.mat", and contains two series: "coastlon" and "coastlat" that can be simply displayed with the command plot(coastlon,coastlat,'-b') for identifyng the position of spatial points in vectors (x,y) without using geographical shapefiles

Unfortunately, the "coastlines" dataset has low resolution and does not provide relevant natural and social features, such as rivers and political boundaries. As an alternative, the World DataBank II (created by the US gov in the '80s) has not such limitations, but is not ready for MatLab and its ASCII translation contain some numerical errors (coordinates out of range)

In this contribution we provide a cleaned and ready-to-use version of the WDB2, of coastlines and related features, divided by 5 continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, Noth America, South America, in *.mat format. Each file contains 3 bivariate arrays: X (coastlines), Y (rivers), Z (political boundaries), W federal boundaries (only for North America) with variables [latitudes, longitudes] of each array, respectively. The coast_demo.m file shows the use and usefulness of the contribution.