Introduction to Spatial Data

We have been mapping points, but there are several spatial features that can be mapped, including polygons. In R, polygons are often stored in a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame that holds the polygon, coordinate information, and a data frame with one row per polygon.

A SpatialPolygonsDataFrame called shp that contains the zip code boundaries for North Carolina has been loaded for you. shp has five slots that store various types of information: