Scatter Plots on Maps in R

How to make scatter plots on maps in R. Scatter plots on maps highlight geographic areas and can be colored by value.

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Plotly is a free and open-source graphing library for R. We recommend you read our Getting Started guide for the latest installation or upgrade instructions, then move on to our Plotly Fundamentals tutorials or dive straight in to some Basic Charts tutorials.

Basic Scatter on Map

library(plotly)
df <- read.csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/2011_february_us_airport_traffic.csv')

# geo styling
g <- list(
  scope = 'usa',
  projection = list(type = 'albers usa'),
  showland = TRUE,
  landcolor = toRGB("gray95"),
  subunitcolor = toRGB("gray85"),
  countrycolor = toRGB("gray85"),
  countrywidth = 0.5,
  subunitwidth = 0.5
)

fig <- plot_geo(df, lat = ~lat, lon = ~long)
fig <- fig %>% add_markers(
    text = ~paste(airport, city, state, paste("Arrivals:", cnt), sep = "<br />"),
    color = ~cnt, symbol = I("square"), size = I(8), hoverinfo = "text"
  )
fig <- fig %>% colorbar(title = "Incoming flights<br />February 2011")
fig <- fig %>% layout(
    title = 'Most trafficked US airports<br />(Hover for airport)', geo = g
  )

fig

Style Scatter Map Layout

library(plotly)
df <- read.csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/2015_06_30_precipitation.csv')

# change default color scale title
m <- list(colorbar = list(title = "Total Inches"))

# geo styling
g <- list(
  scope = 'north america',
  showland = TRUE,
  landcolor = toRGB("grey83"),
  subunitcolor = toRGB("white"),
  countrycolor = toRGB("white"),
  showlakes = TRUE,
  lakecolor = toRGB("white"),
  showsubunits = TRUE,
  showcountries = TRUE,
  resolution = 50,
  projection = list(
    type = 'conic conformal',
    rotation = list(lon = -100)
  ),
  lonaxis = list(
    showgrid = TRUE,
    gridwidth = 0.5,
    range = c(-140, -55),
    dtick = 5
  ),
  lataxis = list(
    showgrid = TRUE,
    gridwidth = 0.5,
    range = c(20, 60),
    dtick = 5
  )
)

fig <- plot_geo(df, lat = ~Lat, lon = ~Lon, color = ~Globvalue)
fig <- fig %>% add_markers(
    text = ~paste(df$Globvalue, "inches"), hoverinfo = "text"
  )
fig <- fig %>% layout(title = 'US Precipitation 06-30-2015<br>Source: NOAA', geo = g)

fig

What About Dash?

Dash for R is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash for R at https://dashr.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig, you can display the same figure in a Dash for R application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dashCoreComponents package like this:

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly() 
# fig <- fig %>% add_trace( ... )
# fig <- fig %>% layout( ... ) 

library(dash)
library(dashCoreComponents)
library(dashHtmlComponents)

app <- Dash$new()
app$layout(
    htmlDiv(
        list(
            dccGraph(figure=fig) 
        )
     )
)

app$run_server(debug=TRUE, dev_tools_hot_reload=FALSE)