Let's create an interactive map!

General note: migration to the more actively developed sf package is currently advised by the sp maintainer. The sp package, used in this tutorial, is still maintained in order to support the newest versions of the GDAL and PROJ backends.

Introduction

The required packages are leaflet and sp.

library(leaflet)
library(sp)

Dummy data

Let’s create a dummy data.frame to play around, i.e. the three locations of INBO:

names <- c("VAC HT", "Geraardsbergen", "Linkebeek")
lat <- c(50.865664, 50.760201, 50.767950)
lon <- c(4.349944, 3.874300, 4.333044)
data <- data.frame(names, lat, lon)

We created three points:

plot(data$lon, data$lat)

Creating a map

We need to convert the data.frame to a SpatialPointsDataFrame:

crs_wgs84 <- CRS(SRS_string = "EPSG:4326")
pts <- SpatialPointsDataFrame(data[c("lon","lat")], 
                              data[!(names(data) %in% c("lon","lat"))],
                              proj4string = crs_wgs84)

The leaflet package is ideal to create a basic interactive map:

library(leaflet)
leaf_map <-
  leaflet(pts) %>% 
  addTiles(group = "OSM") %>%
  addCircleMarkers()

leaf_map

Note: run the code to see the interactive map.

Nice, no?!

More information is provided at the leaflet information website!