Re:Earth Papers is an open tile service: a growing shelf of openly-licensed map data, served ready to use from one origin. Raster basemaps and painterly styles rendered here from vector data; satellite and thematic imagery from NASA, ESA, Natural Earth and Stamen; vector tilesets from Overture and Natural Earth for you to style yourself. Everything you see in this preview is a live endpoint — point any map client at it.

Endpoints

• /catalog.json — machine-readable index of every tileset.
• /{id}/tilejson.json — TileJSON 3.0.0, attribution included.
• /{id}/{z}/{x}/{y}.{ext} — XYZ tiles.
• /styles/{theme}/tilejson.json — a rendered basemap theme, e.g. papers-light.
• /attribution — every tileset's sources and licences (.json too).

Pick a tileset in the gallery and the Copy buttons hand you its exact URLs. Every response is CORS-open.

Reading the gallery

Every card is tagged with what a client gets — raster or vector — and, where it applies, a suffix for where the bytes come from. Vector tilesets have no picture to preview, so their thumbnail shows MVT instead. Four arrangements sit behind those tags:

• Rendered on demand (raster) — the basemap themes and the paint styles. Nothing is stored per theme: each tile is drawn in the Worker from the mirrored vector data when you ask for it, then cached.
• Served from our mirror (raster, vector) — the datasets we copy into R2 as a COG or PMTiles archive. Fastest, and the archive itself is downloadable.
• Proxied (·px) — we serve the bytes but mirror nothing: the Worker range-reads a remote archive on demand. Overture works this way, so its tiles inherit whatever the upstream release is doing.
• Passthrough (·pt) — the TileJSON points straight at the provider (NASA GIBS, EOX), so your client fetches those tiles from them, not from us. We supply the TileJSON and its attribution; availability is theirs.

Hover a badge to see the same thing spelled out.

Sample code (MapLibre)

import maplibregl from "maplibre-gl";

const map = new maplibregl.Map({
  container: "map",
  center: [139.767, 35.681],
  zoom: 11,
  style: {
    version: 8,
    sources: {
      papers: {
        type: "raster",
        // Any tilejson.json from /catalog.json works here.
        url: "https://papers.reearth.land/styles/papers-light/tilejson.json",
      },
    },
    layers: [{ id: "papers", type: "raster", source: "papers" }],
  },
});

Attribution (required)

Each tileset carries its required credit in the attribution field of its TileJSON or style, and most clients render that automatically — which is why a TileJSON URL is the better thing to hand your map. A raw XYZ URL carries no such metadata, so if you use one, display the attribution for each tileset you use; Copy XYZ URL shows you the exact text.

Those credits are short because most licences allow it: only a licence that requires its notice on the map itself — ODbL, hence © OpenStreetMap contributors — stays in the line. The rest sit behind the Re:Earth Papers link every credit carries, which goes to /attribution: every source, with its licence, per tileset.

Operating policy

• This is a best-effort community service: no SLA, no uptime guarantee, no support commitment. That says what we promise, not how much you may use it — the service is here to be used.
• It's a shared endpoint, so please be gentle: no bulk crawling or pre-seeding of whole zoom levels. For work at that scale, take the single-file archives instead — /{id}.tif and /{id}.pmtiles support HTTP Range, so GDAL, QGIS and PMTiles clients can read them directly.
• The cartography is still moving. Styles get retuned and renders are re-versioned, so the same tile URL can return a different picture without notice. Pin your own copy if you need the image to stay put.
• The vector basemap the styles render from — currently Protomaps' daily OpenStreetMap build — is re-mirrored monthly, so the map follows OSM with roughly that lag; the other datasets are frozen snapshots of their published releases.

Operator

Operated by Eukarya Inc. as part of the Re:Earth ecosystem. Source, architecture notes and the full tileset table live in the repository; bugs and requests are welcome as issues there.