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Very basic figure question

5 messages · Rob Forsyth, Barry Rowlingson, Paul Hiemstra +2 more

#
A complete geo-tyro demonstrating ignorance here: please be tolerant!

I have a large dataset comprising the results of a questionnaire from  
UK respondents. I am interested in geographic variation in responses  
and have built mixed-effect models incorporating County/Unitary  
Authority/Local Authority (a level of local government in the UK) as a  
factor-level random effect in lme4. Extracting the intercept of the  
random effects I can generate a normalised 0-1 score for each local  
authority. I would like to illustrate the results of this analysis and  
generate a map showing LAs coloured using this normalised score to set  
gray scale.

We have campus access to ArcGIS and related programmes but I have no  
knowledge of these whatsoever and wondered if for this limited task I  
could work within R? Are there any suitable public domain map objects  
and how would I go about this?

Thank you
#
On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 11:28 AM, Rob Forsyth
<r.j.forsyth at newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:
You certainly can draw coloured maps in R using the sp package and
various other things to help you get the data, such as the rgdal
package for reading shapefiles. However, getting the boundary data is
another problem...

 UK boundary data in the public domain? Ooh, I nearly laughed myself
off my chair! Are you american? No, UK border data is copyright,
controlled, restricted and if you want it you probably end up with an
MI5 file. Academics can get access to various boundary data sets via
ukborders. but we academics already have MI5 files as dangerous
intellectual subversives anyway:

http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/

Barry
#
Rob Forsyth wrote:
I would rather say that for this limited problem you could use ArcGIS 
:), for more complex ones use R ;).

cheers,
Paul

  
    
#
> off my chair! Are you american? No, UK border data is copyright,
 > controlled, restricted and if you want it you probably end up with an
 > MI5 file. Academics can get access to various boundary data sets via
 > ukborders. but we academics already have MI5 files as dangerous
 > intellectual subversives anyway:
 >
 > http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/
 >


Hello!

Very basic borders can be found here...
GADM database of Global Administrative Areas - http://www.gadm.org/

Maybe data found here: http://www.geonames.org could also be helpfull

kind regards,
Albin
#
Hi Rob, 

You could start with the maps available within R. Here is some text taken from page 88-89 from the ASDAR-book:
" It is often attractive to make use of the spatial databases in the maps (comm: and also the mapdata) package. They can be converted to sp class objects using functions such as map2SpatialPolygons in the maptools package. An alternative source of coastlines is the Rgshhs function in maptools, interfacing binary databases of varying resolution distributed by the 'Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database' project.1212 http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/wessel/gshhs/gshhs.html.4.2 <http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/wessel/gshhs/gshhs.html.4.2>  Vector File Formats 89. The best resolution databases are rather large, and so maptools ships only with the coarse resolution one; users can install and use higher resolution databases locally. Figures 2.3 and 2.7, among others in earlier chapters, have been made using these sources."

Alternatively you could make use of the maps provided through the FAO  (http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home <http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home>  ). Here you can download for example shorelines and a basic map with country borders (but good enough for reference purposes). 

Henk

 

 

Henk Sierdsema 

SOVON Vogelonderzoek Nederland / SOVON Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology 

Rijksstraatweg 178 
6573 DG  Beek-Ubbergen 
The Netherlands 
tel: +31 (0)24 6848145 
fax: +31 (0)24 6848122 



 

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- 
Van: r-sig-geo-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
[mailto:r-sig-geo-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch <mailto:r-sig-geo-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch> ]Namens Rob Forsyth 
Verzonden: donderdag 15 oktober 2009 12:28 
Aan: r-sig-geo at stat.math.ethz.ch 
Onderwerp: [R-sig-Geo] Very basic figure question 


 

A complete geo-tyro demonstrating ignorance here: please be tolerant! 

I have a large dataset comprising the results of a questionnaire from  
UK respondents. I am interested in geographic variation in responses  
and have built mixed-effect models incorporating County/Unitary  
Authority/Local Authority (a level of local government in the UK) as a  
factor-level random effect in lme4. Extracting the intercept of the  
random effects I can generate a normalised 0-1 score for each local  
authority. I would like to illustrate the results of this analysis and  
generate a map showing LAs coloured using this normalised score to set  
gray scale. 

We have campus access to ArcGIS and related programmes but I have no  
knowledge of these whatsoever and wondered if for this limited task I  
could work within R? Are there any suitable public domain map objects  
and how would I go about this? 

Thank you 

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