latamMap: Maps of Latin American countries and dependent territories
In LimaRAF/plantR: Managing Species Records from Biological Collections

latamMap

R Documentation

Maps of Latin American countries and dependent territories

Description

Maps used to perform the validation of the original geographical coordinates. For each country, the map contains the lowest administrative level available at GADM. We considered an initial total of 51 countries and dependent territories for Latin America, but since seven of them are available only at the lowest administrative level (e.g. Aruba, Curacao), they were not included in this map (total of 44 individual polygons). The Latin American definition used here include all American territories but the United States and Canada.

Usage

data(latamMap)

Format

A list of 44 Multipolygon 'sf' objects

Details

Locality names (e.g. country, state, county) were edited to match the plantR default gazetteer, using the same plantR functions used for locality editing (i.e. fixLoc(), prepLoc()).

For Brazil, we cross-checked and corrected about 400 issues in GADM (version 3.6) related to municipality names with typos, old toponyms, switched names and even bad name assignment to polygons (e.g. Manaus assigned under another municipality, Maués). An internal list of those changes (gadmCheck) is provided for reproducibility.

Finally, polygons were simplified (tolerance: 0.0001 decimal degrees) to make maps smaller in size and thus less burdensome for the geographical validation procedures.

Reference system: WSG84