[R] Alaska and Hawaii map data?

[Ray Brownrigg]

On Sun, 22 Jan 2012, Kevin Burton wrote:
> I installed 'spatial' and could not see that the package includes data to
> map Alaska and Hawaii along with the associated counties .I saw in the demo
> for the package 'sp' that county data was read in for the state of North
> Carolina but I am unclear where the database containing this information
> is. If I were to add the functionality myself I would need to start with
> some sort of database that consists of polygons that describe the
> applicable counties. Unfortunately I don't have that kind of time. Surely
> this has been done before.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
Kevin:

Did you look at package maptools?  I haven't myself delved into any of the other mapping 
packages, but I understand that maptools will handle shapefiles, which are generally 
freely available for the US states (and most countries).  See e.g.
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.html for a description, then
ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/pvs/tiger2010st/ to get the county numbers, then
ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010/COUNTY/2010/ to download the relevant 
shapefiles.

Hope this helps,
Ray Brownrigg

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ray Brownrigg [mailto:Ray.Brownrigg at ecs.vuw.ac.nz]
> Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 1:55 PM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Cc: Kevin Burton
> Subject: Re: [R] Alaska and Hawaii map data?
> 
> On Fri, 20 Jan 2012, Kevin Burton wrote:
> > I can plot each county of the contiguous 48 states or all of them
> > using variations of
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > map('county', region=c('wisconsin' . . . .)
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > in the maps package. I was wondering whether similar data was
> > available for Alaska and Hawaii? I was also wondering if there was a
> > database that listed FIPS codes for the counties in Alaska and Hawaii.
> 
> Similar to 'county.fips'.
> 
> None of these is part of the maps package.  Sorry.
> 
> The good news is that maps is a *source* package, so if you need new
> functionality, you are quite at liberty to add it yourself.
> 
> Further, there are other mapping (and more general 'spatial') packages
> available, that may provide such functionality.  See the CRAN spatial
> taskview at:
> http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html
> 
> Ray Brownrigg
> 
> > Thank you.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Kevin Burton
> > 
> > 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> > 
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