Site icon R-bloggers

Using a new Mapbox Studio map in an R Leaflet project

[This article was first published on Kyle Walker, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Mapbox recently announced that map styles designed in the new Mapbox Studio are now available as basemaps in other platforms, such as Tableau, CartoDB, and ArcGIS Online: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/use-studio-styles-in-gis-tools/. Previously, this wasn’t possible due to these tools’ incompatibility with the GL-based vector tiles produced by Studio. However, Mapbox now translates GL vector tiles to tiles that are compatible with these products, as well as Leaflet.js, with its Tiles API: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-studio-tiles-static/. This means that beautiful maps designed in Studio are accessible to R users as well!

Let’s say that you have some data you’d like to plot on a map:

library(sp)
## Loading required package: methods
library(leaflet)

df <- data.frame(longitude = runif(10, -97.365268, -97.356546), 
                 latitude = runif(10, 32.706071, 32.712210))

coordinates(df) <- ~longitude+latitude

leaflet(df) %>% addMarkers() %>% addTiles()

There are many great basemaps that you could use in RStudio’s Leaflet package to provide a visual reference for the data; however, let’s say that you’ve designed a basemap in Mapbox Studio that you’d like to use yourself. With a little extra code, you can get this done!

One use case of Mapbox Studio is to create tiled basemaps from georeferenced TIFF images, like scanned-in and georeferenced paper maps. I’ve uploaded an old georeferenced map of TCU (we have new construction constantly here!) to my Mapbox Studio account and published it already as a style. I then navigate to the style in Mapbox Studio, and look for the “Share and Use” link, which takes me to this screen:

Under “Develop with this style” I click “Leaflet” which gives me a URL to use my Mapbox Studio style in a Leaflet project. I then head back to RStudio, where I can pass this string to the urlTemplate parameter in the addTiles() function. I add an attribution (be sure to do this if you are using Mapbox tiles and/or a georeferenced image) and generate the map.

tcu_map <- "https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/kwalkertcu/ciod1uxb6001otbmfpbulvzgj/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}?access_token=pk.eyJ1Ijoia3dhbGtlcnRjdSIsImEiOiJjaW9jenN1OGwwNGZsdjRrcWZnazh2OXVxIn0.QJrmnV9lJzdXHkH95ERdjw"

map_attr <- "© <a href='https://www.mapbox.com/map-feedback/'>Mapbox</a> Basemap © <a href='http://www.tcu.edu'>Texas Christian University</a>"

leaflet(df) %>% 
  addMarkers() %>%
  addTiles(urlTemplate = tcu_map, attribution = map_attr)

Please note: your map won’t show up in the RStudio Viewer pane; pop it out to a web browser to view it.

Of course, Mapbox Studio can also be used to generate your own custom basemaps by styling OpenStreetMap data right in the application. When I first demo Mapbox Studio in class, we quickly run through the various options to show how easy it is to style the OpenStreetMap data – and often make rather garish-looking maps for fun, like the basemap below!

ugly_map <- "https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/kwalkertcu/cijvq6bl0006o3slwlamsjawk/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}?access_token=pk.eyJ1Ijoia3dhbGtlcnRjdSIsImEiOiJjaW9jenN1OGwwNGZsdjRrcWZnazh2OXVxIn0.QJrmnV9lJzdXHkH95ERdjw"

mb_attribution <- "© <a href='https://www.mapbox.com/map-feedback/'>Mapbox</a> © <a href='http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright'>OpenStreetMap</a>"

leaflet(df) %>% 
  addMarkers() %>%
  addTiles(urlTemplate = ugly_map, attribution = mb_attribution)

Though the above is purposely not a good example, Mapbox is capable of stunning customized cartography, which is available to R users in their cartography projects, Shiny applications, etc.

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Kyle Walker.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.