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I'd like to create some GIS plots, and I'm wondering if R can be used for this. Here are some examples of plots I'd similar in concept to those I'd like to make:

  • A temperature plot (or contour plot) of the United States, with color (or height) determined by state GDP. Thus, state boundaries would give discontinuities in the resulting plot.
  • A temperature plot of the United States where altitude is used for data. In this case, the resulting plot should vary smoothly across state boundaries.
  • The sum of the above 2 plots (with some scaling applied).

I'm just starting to learn R, and want to know if it would be the right tool for this kind of job. Looking at the coord_map of ggplot2, it looks like superimposing data onto the US is possible. But getting data to respect state boundaries could be very difficult.

Any advice?

stretch44
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3 Answers3

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First, you have the maps, mapproj and maptools packages, that give you a wide variety of map functions, projections, and so on to create about any map you can think of.

Then there is the sp package, which -among other things- allows you to plot any kind of data you load from the GADM database.

But most of all, there is the spatial projects page of R which gives you a whole lot more information, including links to mailing lists, to get going with R and spatial data. And if that's not enough, you have the CRAN Task View page for spatial data, listing 100+ packages to do what you want to do.

Think you had it now? There is more! Both books for sale and free blogs can help you finding out how to do what you want to do. And if you have some specific question, you can always come to StackOverflow , or use any of the mailing lists to get some more help.

So you see : This is R. There is no if. Only how. (Simon Blomberg)

powered by googling.

Joris Meys
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    The great thing about spatial data is that it's handled by classes as constructed by the `sp` package. Methods for you-name-it use those classes and make use seamless. – Roman Luštrik Apr 22 '11 at 16:51
  • Thanks for the guidance! Looks like I have quite a bit of reading to do. – stretch44 Apr 22 '11 at 20:10
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it still at alpha stage but the Rgis (composed of R packages terrain, RemoteSensing, gdistance ..) project look very promising. You can test the package on r-forge. For raster data (DEM, altitude,...) handling there is the excellent raster package, and for other task like polygon clipping and more complicated stuff you can use rgeos (bidding of GEOS libs), maptools (for format exchange) or PBSmapping, and of course the sp package and the companion book Applied Spatial Analysis with R (Bivand, Pebsema and Rubio 2008) is a must.

On the other way, you can also link R to GIS like grass (spgrass6), saga (RSAGA), even QGIS and arcGIS but i don't use them.

finally you have to take a look at http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html

dickoa
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You might also want to look at this.
Integrating External programs with Modelbuilder

Using R in ArcGIS 10

and a thread

from Roger Bivand with useful links, advice, and some code for raster import.

Brad Nesom
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