Mapping data using R and leaflet

The R language provides many different tools for creating maps and adding data to them. I’ve been using the leaflet package at work recently, so I thought I’d provide a short example here.

Whilst searching for some data that might make a nice map, I came across this article at ABC News. It includes a table containing Australian members of parliament, their electorate and their voting intention regarding legalisation of same-sex marriage. Since I reside in New South Wales, let’s map the data for electorates in that state.

Putting data on maps using R: easier than ever

New Zealand earthquake density 2010 – November 2016

Using R to add data to maps has been pretty straightforward for a few years now. That said, it seems easier than ever to do things like use map APIs (e.g. Google, Open Street Map), overlay quite complex data visualisations (e.g. “heatmap-style” densities) and even generate animations.

A couple of key R packages in this space: ggmap and gganimate. To illustrate, I’ve used data from the recent New Zealand earthquake to generate some static maps and an animation. Here’s the Github repository and a report. Thanks to Florian Teschner for a great ggmap tutorial which got me started.

My own work in bioinformatics to date has not (sadly!) required much analysis of geospatial data but I can see use cases in many areas – environmental microbiology, for example.

BioStar users (of the world, unite)

Egon writes:

Can someone please plot the BioStar users on a Google Map?

Sounds like a challenge. Let’s go.