State List map by Drew Weber on Nemesis Bird

17Aug/117

State List map

While working on some of my data for my grad thesis, I have played around with how to best visualize data using the stats program R. This led from one thing to another, and surprise, I ended up making a graphic from my state life lists. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what I can probably do with this but here is the product of just a few hours work this evening. One thing is certain, I need to go back and enter some of my old lists because I know I have seen a lot more species in some of the states than this chart shows.

Filed under: analysis, birding, listing Leave a comment

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http://abqbirding.wordpress.com Matt

That’s so cool. I’ve used R in the past but my skills are pretty rusty. Where did you get the map from? Did you use the map() function? I wonder if you could expand this to counties easily. A GIS program would probably help with that.

http://nemesisbird.com Drew

I used the googleVis library. I actually have GIS set up to take my lists from eBird and make some nice maps of counties. Check out the attached image.

Rtwillia

Drew, would you share the code you used to identify the county borders in gvisGeoMap()? Also, do you know of a way to map a single state and counties (or other arbitrary borders) within it? Very curious about this. Thanks!

http://nemesisbird.com Drew

The county map is all in ArcGIS. Unfortunately google doesn’t seem to have a good way to do counties with their tools so I haven’t found a way to do what you are looking for.

http://twitter.com/blobbybirdman Mark Robinson, Ph.D

This makes my bird nerd happy, any chance you would share the R code with lazier bird nerds?

http://nemesisbird.com Drew

Mark, give this code a try.
# Google Chart Tools sample
# install.packages(“googleVis”, dependencies=T)
library(googleVis) # load googleVis library
# demo(“googleVis”) #check out demo for lots of map options
# create a csv with columns for state name (State) and life list(Life)

df<-read.csv("states.csv", na.strings="NA",header=TRUE)

## Geo Map, requires Flash
statelife <- gvisGeoMap(df, "State", "Life", options=list(region="US", dataMode="regions", width=700, height=500))

plot(statelife)