how to retrieve the location/area from given coordinates?

Question

I have columns in my data frame for longitude and latitude, which has specific coordinates such as:

longitude      latitude
-80.21148009   26.05230418
-96.70594765   40.82043599
...

How can I map the coordinate data I have with the corresponding city/region/state?

Ideally, this would be flexible; for example, I could map to the state-level if needed, or by zip code for another application.

I know there are some packages that can map cities to coordinates, but I haven't been able to find a method that can link coordinates to over-arching regions.

Are your coordinates all in the USA (as the examples are), or are they also global? — Kevin Troy, Oct 09 '19 at 19:26
this is called "reverse geocoding": start with https://www.google.com/search?q=reverse+geocoding+R — Ben Bolker, Oct 09 '19 at 19:26
there's even a [reverse-geocoding] tag on SO, so try https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r+reverse-geocoding — Ben Bolker, Oct 09 '19 at 19:53

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 09 '19 at 19:30

What you need is called reverse geocoding. There are multiple packages that will get you there. For example, you can use ggmap::revgeocode based off Google Geocoding and Places API. It needs your Google credentials to work:

ggmap::revgeocode(c(-80.21148009, 26.05230418))

See ?ggmap::revgeocode for details.

how to retrieve the location/area from given coordinates?

1 Answers1