Highlight a Region in a Country with ggplot2 (02_05)

In this I used the function st_touches() from the {sf} package to extract the states that border Texas. The {sf} package contains several functions like this for detecting/extracting parts of an {sf} object that meet a specific geometric condition. Some examples include: 

• st_touches() for testing if polygons share a border (that does not overlap)

• st_overlaps() for testing if polygons overlap

• st_covers() for testing if points belong to a polygon

It’s easiest to demonstrate how st_covers() works:

This function will test if the features in x are covered by y. We set spare = FALSE because otherwise the function will return a complicated “sparse geometry predicate”, instead what we get back is a vector containing TRUE for covered parts of x and FALSE for uncovered parts.

With that in mind, here’s the code I showed again:

1. st_covers() returns a vector of TRUE/FALSE for states from us_contiguous that touch texas_state. Let’s call this vector touching_predicate.

2. The code can now be read as follows: us_contiguous[touching_predicate, ]

3. This will return those rows from us_contiguous touch texas_state.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a tidyverse-friendly way to work with these functions. The Spatial Data Operations chapter of Geocomputation with R provides more information about how to do these types of {sf} data manipulation.