Creating maps in R just like the way rworldmap does but for specific country with provinces

Question

I use the rworldmap package with WorldBank Data and I enjoy it. I want to plot maps for Iran, with data related to each province. What are the steps to do that? I know we can plot maps like that in R for some countries like US but not for all countries.

Answer 1

You can combine rworldmap with the great suggestion from @jazzurro of using raster to get GADM boundaries.

I suspect your main difficulty might be getting the province names to match between your data and the map.

The example below, uses defaults that you can change and just gives a different colour for each province.

library(raster)
library(rworldmap)
## 1 Get map of provinces (level 1 admin regions)
iranLevel1<- raster::getData("GADM", country = "Iran", level = 1)

## 2 join your [data] onto the map by specifying the join column in each
## this will report on any mis-matches between province names
#iranLevel1 <- rworldmap::joinData2Map([data],nameMap="iranLevel1",nameJoinIDMap="NAME_1",nameJoinColumnData=[insert])

## 3 plot map (change NAME_1 to the data you want to plot)
rworldmap::mapPolys(iranLevel1, nameColumnToPlot="NAME_1", addLegend=FALSE)

## 4 add text labels for provinces
text(iranLevel1, label="NAME_1", cex=0.7)

Note that joinData2Map(), mapPolys() are more generic equivalents of joinCountryData2Map(), mapCountryData().

Another way of doing this would be to use the choroplethr package.