Error when plotting latitude and longitude points on US map in RStudio

Question

I have a dataframe with the latitude and longitudes of lakes I wanted to plot on a map of northeast USA. I'm following this tutorial on how to create maps and plot them.

I can run the code (below) just fine as featured in the tutorial link.

library (ggplot2)
library(sf)
library(rnaturalearth)
library(rnaturalearthdata)
library(rgeos)

world <- ne_countries(scale = "medium", returnclass = "sf")

(sites <- data.frame(longitude = c(-80.144005, -80.109), latitude = c(26.479005, 26.83)))

ggplot(data = world) + 
geom_point(data = sites, aes(x = longitude, y = latitude), size = 4, 
         shape = 23, fill = "darkred") + 
coord_sf(xlim = c(-88, -78), ylim = c(24.5, 33), expand = FALSE)

but when I personalize the code for my dataset containing a latitude and longitude column for several lakes in New England, USA, I get an error:

My dataframe of lat and long:

        LAT_DD83  LON_DD83
    23  41.37213 -71.56798
    34  42.33589 -71.90907
    39  41.51963 -71.76691
    62  41.78447 -71.64064
    76  43.93213 -70.62131
    129 41.41433 -71.54638

My code:

ggplot(data = world) +  geom_sf() +  
geom_point(data = lat_lon, aes(x = LON_DD83, y = LAT_DD83), size = 4, shape = 23, fill = "darkred") +  
coord_sf(xlim = c(-80, -65), ylim = c(40, 50), expand = FALSE)

ERROR received:

#Error in st_cast.POINT(x[[1]], to, ...) : cannot create MULTILINESTRING from POINT

I don't quite understand what this error means. What am I missing?

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 07 '21 at 04:55

So, I'm not sure why, but if you adjust the xlim from 80 to 79 then it works fine. I thought perhaps it could be an issue with projection, but even if the points are converted to an sf object and matching the projection of world, then I get the same error with your data. But adjusting the xlim seems to do the trick:

ggplot(data = world) +
  geom_sf() +
  geom_point(
    data = lat_lon,
    aes(x = LON_DD83, y = LAT_DD83),
    size = 4,
    shape = 23,
    fill = "darkred"
  ) +
  coord_sf(xlim = c(-79,-65),
           ylim = c(40, 50),
           expand = FALSE)

Output

Data

lat_lon <-
  structure(list(
    LAT_DD83 = c(41.37213, 42.33589, 41.51963, 41.78447,
                 43.93213, 41.41433),
    LON_DD83 = c(
      -71.56798,-71.90907,-71.76691,
      -71.64064,-70.62131,-71.54638
    )
  ),
  class = "data.frame",
  row.names = c(NA,-6L))

Thanks, your correction works on my end! R can be so finnicky and delicate sometimes — protistgal, Nov 07 '21 at 17:35

Error when plotting latitude and longitude points on US map in RStudio

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