Showcase of Viridis, maps, and ggcounty

This posts shows how easy it can be to build an visually pleasing plot. We will use hrbrmster’s ggcounty, which is an R package at this Github repo. Graphics engine is as mostly in my plots, Hadley Wickhams ggplot. All build on R. Standing on shoulders…

Disclaimer: This example heavily draws on hrbrmster example on this page. All credit is due to Rudy, and those on whose work he built up on.

First, load the relevant packages:

library(ggcounty)  # us maps
library(viridis)  # color scheme
library(tidyverse)  # data handling

## Warning: package 'dplyr' was built under R version 3.5.1

Load population data:

data(population, package = "ggcounty")

Split population figures in bins:

population$brk <- cut(population$count, 
                      breaks=c(0, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, 1000000, 10000000), 
                      labels=c("0-99", "100-1K", "1K-10K", "10K-100K", 
                               "100K-1M", "1M-10M"),
                      include.lowest=TRUE)

Get the US counties map:

us <- ggcounty.us()

## Loading required package: sp

## Loading required package: maptools

## Checking rgeos availability: TRUE

## Warning: use rgdal::readOGR or sf::st_read

## Warning: Ignoring unknown aesthetics: x, y

gg <- us$g

us$g contains base map:

us$g

Add population data, this plot is called choropleth:

gg <- gg + geom_map(data=population, map=us$map,
                    aes(map_id=FIPS, fill=brk), 
                    color="white", size=0.125)

Now give it the viridis color scheme:

gg + scale_fill_viridis_d()

Besides the default scale of virids, there are some other scales, such as magma and inferno:

gg + scale_fill_viridis_d(option = "magma") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Stunning, isn’t it? And simple. Enjoy!