An R package to hold and facilitate interaction with Natural Earth map data.
This package provides :
access to a pre-downloaded subset of Natural Earth v4.1.0 (March 2018) vector data commonly used in world mapping
easy subsetting by countries and regions
functions to download other Natural Earth vector and raster data
a simple, reproducible and sustainable workflow from Natural Earth data to rnaturalearth enabling updating as new versions become available
clarification of differences in world maps classified by countries, sovereign states and map units
consistency with Natural Earth naming conventions so that rnaturalearth users can use Natural Earth documentation
data in ‘sf’ or ‘sp’ formats
The Natural Earth website structures vector data by scale, category and type. These determine the filenames of downloads. rnaturalearth uses this structure to facilitate download (like an API).
Install from CRAN :
install.packages("rnaturalearth")
or install the development version from GitHub using devtools.
devtools::install_github("ropensci/rnaturalearth")
Data to support much of the package functionality are stored in two data packages that you will be prompted to install when required if you do not do so here.
devtools::install_github("ropensci/rnaturalearthdata")
devtools::install_github("ropensci/rnaturalearthhires")
Here using sp::plot
as a simple, quick way to plot maps. Maps could
also be made with ggplot2
, tmap
or other options. All retrieval
functions accept an argument returnclass = "sf"
to return package sf
(Simple Features) objects.
library(rnaturalearth)
The legacy packages maptools, rgdal, and rgeos, underpinning the sp package,
which was just loaded, will retire in October 2023.
Please refer to R-spatial evolution reports for details, especially
https://r-spatial.org/r/2023/05/15/evolution4.html.
It may be desirable to make the sf package available;
package maintainers should consider adding sf to Suggests:.
The sp package is now running under evolution status 2
(status 2 uses the sf package in place of rgdal)
Support for Spatial objects (`sp`) will be deprecated in {rnaturalearth} and will be removed in a future release of the package. Please use `sf` objects with {rnaturalearth}. For example: `ne_download(returnclass = 'sf')`
library(sp)
# world countries
sp::plot(ne_countries())
Warning: The `returnclass` argument of `ne_download()` sp as of rnaturalearth 1.0.0.
ℹ Please use `sf` objects with {rnaturalearth}, support for Spatial objects
(sp) will be removed in a future release of the package.
This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
generated.
# uk
sp::plot(ne_countries(country = "united kingdom"))
# states, admin level1 boundaries
sp::plot(ne_states(country = "spain"))
vignette("rnaturalearth", package = "rnaturalearth")
There are a wealth of other data available at the Natural
Earth website. rnaturalearth
has
functions to help with download of these data.
The data available are outlined in the two tables below and online here.
category cultural
category physical
Specify the scale
, category
and type
of the vector you want as in
the examples below.
# lakes
lakes110 <- ne_download(scale = 110, type = "lakes", category = "physical")
sp::plot(lakes110)
# rivers
rivers50 <- ne_download(
scale = 50,
type = "rivers_lake_centerlines",
category = "physical",
returnclass = "sf"
)
library(ggplot2)
library(sf)
ggplot(rivers50) +
geom_sf() +
theme_minimal()
vignette("what-is-a-country", package = "rnaturalearth")
Script used to get data into the accompanying data packages.
Thanks to Lincoln Mullen for code structure inspiration from USAboundaries, Hadley Wickham for comments and prompting, Bob Rudis for answers to stackoverflow questions about downloading Natural Earth data into R. The Natural Earth team and Nathan Kelso for providing such a great resource.
facilitate joining of user data to country boundaries
facilitate subsetting by country groupings
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