Keywords: maps, package, sustainability, community
Webpages:
https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rnaturalearth,
https://github.com/ropenscilabs/rnaturalearth rnaturalearth is a new
R package, accepted to
CRAN in March this year. It makes
Natural Earth map data, a free and open resource, more easily accessible to
R users. It aims for a simple, reproducible and sustainable workflow from Natural Earth to
rnaturalearth enabling updating as new versions become available.
rnaturalearth follows from
rworldmap, a
CRAN package for mapping world data, which I released more than 7 years ago.
rworldmap was targetted particularly at relative newcomers to
R, and has now been downloaded more than 100 thousand times. However, the code is ugly and I haven’t had the time to maintain it actively. I have been concerned for a while that making any changes will break it. Now more recently released options such as
tmap and
choroplethr are better than
rworldmap in most respects.
Where
rworldmap tried to do everything,
rnaturalearth aims to do fewer things, but to do them better. This approach my be familiar to people. Also being more specialised allows this pacakage to be used in combination with other packages of the users choice.
It is possible to use
rnaturalearth to have more control over accessing map data, for example specifiying exactly which areas are wanted when dealing with trickiness of countries and dependencies. In this example I use
sp::plot as a simple, quick way to plot map data, however the output can also be returned as
sf objects for plotting using other packages.
library(rnaturalearth) library(sp) # countries, UK undivided sp::plot(ne_countries(country = 'united kingdom', type = 'countries')) # map_units, UK divided into England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland sp::plot(ne_countries(country = 'united kingdom', type = 'map_units')) # map_units, select by geounit to plot Scotland alone sp::plot(ne_countries(geounit = 'scotland', type = 'map_units')) # sovereignty, Falkland Islands included in UK sp::plot(ne_countries(country = 'united kingdom', type = 'sovereignty'), col = 'red') The package contains pre-downloaded country and state boundaries at different resolutions and facilitates access to other vector and raster data for example of lakes, rivers and roads. Each Natural Earth dataset is characterised on the website according to scale, type and category.
rnaturalearth will construct the url and download the corresponding file.
lakes110 <- ne_download(scale = 110, type = 'lakes', category = 'physical') sp::plot(lakes110, col = 'blue') I found the early stages of
rworldmap development a somewhat lonely process.
rnaturalearth has been through the
rOpenSci community open review which improved the code considerably and my experience of developing it. I look forward to this package being more collaborative. I will comment on my experience of issues of community and sustainability within
R package development.
