Lesson 3. Make Interactive Maps with Leaflet R - GIS in R
Learning Objectives
After completing this tutorial, you will be able to:
- Create an interactive map in
R
usingleaflet()
.
What You Need
You will need a computer with internet access to complete this lesson and the data for week 4 of the course.
First, let’s import all of the needed libraries.
# load libraries
library(dplyr)
library(rgdal)
library(ggplot2)
library(leaflet)
# set factors to false
options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
Interactive Maps with Leaflet
Static maps are useful for creating figures for reports and presentation. Sometimes, however, you want to interact with your data. You can use the leaflet package for R to overlay your data on top of interactive maps. You can think about it like Google maps with your data overlaid on top!
What is Leaflet?
Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript
library that can be used to create mobile-friendly interactive maps.
Leaflet:
- Is designed with simplicity, performance and usability in mind.
- Has a beautiful, easy to use, and well-documented API.
The leaflet
R
package ‘wraps’ Leaflet functionality in an easy to use R
package! Below, you can see some code that creates a basic web-map.
map <- leaflet() %>%
addTiles() %>% # use the default base map which is OpenStreetMap tiles
addMarkers(lng = 174.768, lat = -36.852,
popup = "The birthplace of R")
map
Next, import and explore the data.
# import roads
plot_locations <- readOGR("data/week-04/california/SJER/vector_data/SJER_plot_centroids.shp")
## OGR data source with driver: ESRI Shapefile
## Source: "/root/earth-analytics/data/week-04/california/SJER/vector_data/SJER_plot_centroids.shp", layer: "SJER_plot_centroids"
## with 18 features
## It has 5 fields
# reproject to latitude / longitude so the data line up with leaflet basemaps
plot_locations_latlon <- sjer_aoi_WGS84 <- spTransform(plot_locations,
CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84"))
plot_locations_df <- as.data.frame(plot_locations_latlon, region = "id")
str(plot_locations_df)
## 'data.frame': 18 obs. of 8 variables:
## $ Plot_ID : chr "SJER1068" "SJER112" "SJER116" "SJER117" ...
## $ Point : chr "center" "center" "center" "center" ...
## $ northing : num 4111568 4111299 4110820 4108752 4110476 ...
## $ easting : num 255852 257407 256839 256177 255968 ...
## $ plot_type: chr "trees" "trees" "grass" "trees" ...
## $ coords.x1: num -120 -120 -120 -120 -120 ...
## $ coords.x2: num 37.1 37.1 37.1 37.1 37.1 ...
## $ region : chr "id" "id" "id" "id" ...
Plot the data and use the plotID field as a popup.
# plot points on top of a leaflet basemap
site_locations <- leaflet(plot_locations_df) %>%
addTiles() %>%
addCircleMarkers(lng = ~coords.x1, lat = ~coords.x2, popup = ~Plot_ID)
site_locations
Add unique colors according to plot type.
# define colors - you can find colors that look better than these!
pal <- colorFactor(c("navy", "darkgreen", "darkorchid4"), domain = unique(sjer_aoi_WGS84$plot_type))
# plot points on top of a leaflet basemap
site_locations_colors <- leaflet(plot_locations_df) %>%
addTiles() %>%
addCircleMarkers(
color = ~pal(plot_type),
lng = ~coords.x1, lat = ~coords.x2, popup = ~Plot_ID)
site_locations_colors
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