[R] Accurate area map projections

[Roger Bivand]

On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Mark Van De Vyver wrote:

> Hi,
> Could any one point me to the projection, and parameters if necessary, that
> would show each country/continent with it's area accurately refelcted on the
> plot? E.g. aitoff vs. albers vs. bonne vs. cylequalearea vs. guyou - they
> don't all look the same to mee but some of the documentations suggests they
> are equal area?  Of course this isn't my field, so I am largely guessing and
> am prorbably making some naive assumptions :)
> I'm pretty sure this is on the R-help archive but I don't seem to be able to
> access most of the posts that the search returns - I keep getting a 'file
> not found' page...

One of the best online resources is the collection of documentation links 
at:

http://www.remotesensing.org/proj

The manual has figures with examples of projections.

GMT also has projection documentation:

http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/

The printed resources, which are well worth consulting, are: John P. 
Snyder (1987) Map projections - a working manual, USGS professional paper 
1395; Lev M. Bugayevskiy and John P. Snyder (1995) Map projections - a 
reference manual (London, Taylor & Francis). The field is quite extensive, 
and most often a choice that is "right" for one use will not be for 
another. Even measuring area accurately in the field is bad enough, but 
representing it on a flat 2D surface has challenged people for a long time 
and will certainly continue to do so (cartography is an interesting part 
of graphic visualisation!).

> TIA
> Mark
> 
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-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 93 93
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no