Plots of US maps in R usually lack Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.
The reason is plotting takes the literal longitude and latitude
coordinates and maps it to a cartesian x-y coordinate graph. Alaska,
Hawaii, and Puerto Rico are very far from the mainland US when using
this so it can be unwieldy to include them. The usmap
package solves this issue by providing data frames which have Alaska,
Hawaii, and Puerto Rico moved to a convenient spot just to the bottom
left of the contiguous United States.
The raw US map data for counties or states can be obtained for
further manipulation (and joining with data). The default
regions
is "states"
.
FIPS codes are defined in the Federal Information Processing
Standards by the US government. One usage is uniquely identifying US
states and counties. Downloaded data sets from the US Census will often include
FIPS codes as identifiers so it can be helpful to know what a FIPS code
represents. The functions in usmap
are built around the
FIPS code identification system and so convenience methods for accessing
them and performing reverse-lookups have been included.
# Get FIPS code for a state
usmap::fips(state = "MA")
#> [1] "25"
usmap::fips(state = "Massachusetts")
#> [1] "25"
# Get FIPS code for a county
usmap::fips(state = "NJ", county = "Bergen")
#> [1] "34003"
usmap::fips(state = "CA", county = "Orange County")
#> [1] "06059"
# The parameters are NOT case sensitive!
usmap::fips(state = "ca", county = "oRanGe cOUNty")
#> [1] "06059"
If the FIPS code is known and want to see what state/county it
corresponds to, use the reverse lookup function
fips_info
.
More information about FIPS can be read here.
“A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.” - Gilbert H. Grosvenor, Editor of National Geographic (1903 - 1954)