R Tutorial: Map Tiles

Key Takeaways

the leaflet package comes with over a hundred base maps you can use in this video we'll start to explore the various tiles that we can use as the foundation of our web Maps as you work through the exercises I encourage you to experiment with different base maps to expand your awareness of the available options when you are selecting a base map there are several important questions to consider perhaps primary among them is why are you making this map in the first place is this map just for your use or is it part of a larger project that should fit within an existing design framework secondly what type of data will you be plotting will the geographic and topographic features of the base map add to the information you're presenting or confuse your users and my work I tend to prefer grayscale maps when plotting data I find that these maps make it easier for me to distinguish between the data that I'm plotting and the data included with the base map for example in the map on the left the points are similar in color to the features of the base map like the lakes whereas in the map on the right the data we are plotting is easily distinguishable from the features of the base map there are over 100 provider tiles included in the leaflet package most of these tiles you can use by calling the ad providers tile function however there are a few like map box that you'll need to register for prior to using you can access the names of the provider tiles included in the leaflet package by calling the names function on the providers list for example to see the first five provider tiles we call names on the providers list followed by 1 colon 5 and brackets the first 5 tiles are all OpenStreetMap tiles so it might be more useful to print all of the tiles provided by OpenStreetMap which you can do by using the string detect function from the string our package we can swap the default base map out for any of the included provider tiles using the add provider tiles function for example to create a leaflet map that use the black and white OpenStreetMap we replace add tiles with add provider tiles and pass in the name of the desired tile to the function now it's time to put this into practice using the Cardo DB provider tiles