19 Human geography lab: Annex 4

19.1 US states and regions

I will explore different packages that could help with mapping geographical data, specifically for the USA. At first we need to load necessary packages to execute the maps for this lecture.

pacman::p_load(usmap, tidyverse)

Alternatively you can use the pacman package manager for loading the necessary packages for this lecture.

pacman::p_load(usmap, maps, mapdata, sf, plotly, tidyverse, mapview, leaflet, tmap, tmaptools, tigris)

19.2 Using `usmap` package

This is probably the most continent package to plot a USA. map along with some data. Plot all states of the USA to create an empty map.

plot_usmap(regions = "states") + 
  labs(title = "United States",
       subtitle = "This is a map of the United States.") + 
  theme(panel.background=element_blank())

Besides states, we could also plot all counties of the USA.

plot_usmap(regions = "counties") + 
  labs(title = "U.S.A. counties",
       subtitle = "This is a map of the United States.") + 
  theme(panel.background=element_blank())

usmap also provides many different regions to select

plot_usmap(include = .south_region, exclude = c("VA"), labels = TRUE)

usmap also provides north regions map

plot_usmap(include = .south_region, exclude = c("VA"), labels = TRUE)

We can also select certain states by using state abbreviations

plot_usmap(include = c("CT", "ME", "MA", "NH", "VT")) +
  labs(title = "New England Region") +
  theme(panel.background = element_rect(color = "black"))