Skip to content
R for the Rest of Us Logo

Mapping with R

34 lessons

CRS and Projections: Geographic and Projected CRS (01_12)

This lesson is locked

Get access to all lessons in this course.

If the video is not playing correctly, you can watch it in a new window

Transcript

Click on the transcript to go to that point in the video. Please note that transcripts are auto generated and may contain minor inaccuracies.

Learn More

The biggest thing to take away from this video is:

Don’t use geographic CRS for analysis

If you want to read more about coordinate reference systems, Chapter 7 of Geocomputation with R is a good place to start.

In the video I demonstrate the size of 1 degree of longitude changes dependent on latitude. For a more thorough exploration of this I recommend reading this ThoughtCo article. The mathematics of these calculations is definitely not important for your career as a maker of mapo data visualisations. But, if you’re interested in these things see here for a derivation of the degree length formula

When we used st_buffer() to draw circles around the cities we used this code:

world_cities %>% 
  top_n(10, pop) %>% 
  st_buffer(10) 

The size of the buffer is "10" which equates to 10 degrees in CRS 4326. As we'll see in the next video, CRS 3857 is a good choice for a global projected CRS and if we wanted to draw circles with a radius of 1000km we would use this code:

world_cities %>% 
  top_n(10, pop) %>% 
  st_transform(3857) %>% 
  st_buffer(1000E3) %>% 
  mapview()

Have any questions? Put them below and we will help you out!

You need to be signed-in to comment on this post. Login.