This polygon shapefile depicts natural and artificial lakes for Europe only ranked by relative importance, coordinating with river ranking. Includes name attributes. Data primarily derives from Catchment Characterisation and Modelling (CCM) Database 2.1 by the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability. The modified CCM lakes offered here are intended for small-scale cartographic use. Only a portion of CCM data is used, representing major lakes (classes 4 and 5 in the MAINDRAIN attributes column). Generalization and smoothing were applied to these selected data. These data are represented at 1:10,000,000 scale. This layer is part of the Natural Earth Collection (v.2.0.0).Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10, 1:50 and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.