[R Course] Data Visualization with R: Colored Map Levels

A map with colored levels of granularity made using the raster and ggplot2 packages.

This course will teach you how to draw lines to divide a country into smaller regions and add colors. This tutorial is an extension of the following course: Data Visualization with R: Map Levels.

Load packages

library(maptools)
library(raster)
library(plyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(rgdal)

Retrieve and manipulate data

Canada1 <- getData('GADM', country="CAN", level=1) 

Canada1@data$NAME_1

 [1] "Alberta"                   "British Columbia"         
 [3] "Manitoba"                  "New Brunswick"            
 [5] "Newfoundland and Labrador" "Northwest Territories"    
 [7] "Nova Scotia"               "Nunavut"                  
 [9] "Ontario"                   "Prince Edward Island"     
[11] "Québec"                    "Saskatchewan"             
[13] "Yukon"                    

Quebec<-Canada1[Canada1@data$NAME_1 == "Québec",]
Quebec_df<-fortify(Quebec)

NAME_1<-Canada1@data$NAME_1
count<-sample(1:1000,13)     #or any other data you can associate with admin level here

count_df<-data.frame(NAME_1, count)

Canada1@data$id <- rownames(Canada1@data)
Canada1@data <- join(Canada1@data, count_df, by="NAME_1")
Canada1_df <- fortify(Canada1)
Canada1_df <- join(Canada1_df,Canada1@data, by="id")

Create map

theme_opts<-list(theme(panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
                       panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
                       panel.background = element_blank(),
                       plot.background = element_blank(),
                       axis.line = element_blank(),
                       axis.text.x = element_blank(),
                       axis.text.y = element_blank(),
                       axis.ticks = element_blank(),
                       axis.title.x = element_blank(),
                       axis.title.y = element_blank(),
                       plot.title = element_blank()))

ggplot() + 
  geom_polygon(data=Canada1_df, aes(long,lat,group=group), fill="whitesmoke")+
  geom_path(data=Canada1_df, aes(long,lat, group=group), color="grey", size=0.1) +
  theme(aspect.ratio=1)+
  theme_opts

ggplot() + 
  geom_polygon(data = Canada1_df, aes(x = long, y = lat, group = group, fill =
                                       count), color = "black", size = 0.25) +
  theme(aspect.ratio=1)

library(scales)
ggplot() + 
  geom_polygon(data = Canada1_df, aes(x = long, y = lat, group = group, fill =
                                       count), color = "black", size = 0.25) +
  theme(aspect.ratio=1)+
  scale_fill_distiller(name="Count", palette = "YlGn", breaks = pretty_breaks(n = 5))