Getting data using a package

Reading in spatial data from a file is one way to get spatial data into R, but there are also some packages that provide commonly used spatial data. For example, the rnaturalearth package provides data from Natural Earth, a source of high resolution world maps including coastlines, states, and populated places. In fact, this was the source of the data from Chapter 2.

You will be examining median income at the census tract level in New York County (a.k.a. the Bourough of Manhattan), but to do this you'll need to know the boundaries of the census tracts. The tigris package in R provides a way to easily download and import shapefiles based on US Census geographies. You'll use the tracts() function to download tract boundaries, but tigris also provides states(), counties(), places() and many other functions that match the various levels of geographic entities defined by the Census.

Let's grab the spatial data for the tracts.

Call tracts() with state = "NY", county = "New York", and cb = TRUE. Store the result in nyc_tracts.
Use summary() on nyc_tracts to verify the retuned object is a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame.
Plot nyc_tracts to check the contents with plot().

Exercise

Getting data using a package

Instructions