Latitude Longitude Coordinates to State Code in R

Question

Is there a fast way to convert latitude and longitude coordinates to State codes in R? I've been using the zipcode package as a look up table but it's too slow when I'm querying lots of lat/long values

If not in R is there any way to do this using google geocoder or any other type of fast querying service?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is a function that takes a data.frame of lat-longs within the lower 48 states, and for each point, returns the state in which it is located.

Most of the function simply prepares the SpatialPoints and SpatialPolygons objects needed by the over() function in the sp package, which does the real heavy lifting of calculating the 'intersection' of points and polygons:

library(sp)
library(maps)
library(maptools)

# The single argument to this function, pointsDF, is a data.frame in which:
#   - column 1 contains the longitude in degrees (negative in the US)
#   - column 2 contains the latitude in degrees

latlong2state <- function(pointsDF) {
    # Prepare SpatialPolygons object with one SpatialPolygon
    # per state (plus DC, minus HI & AK)
    states <- map('state', fill=TRUE, col="transparent", plot=FALSE)
    IDs <- sapply(strsplit(states$names, ":"), function(x) x[1])
    states_sp <- map2SpatialPolygons(states, IDs=IDs,
                     proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84"))

    # Convert pointsDF to a SpatialPoints object 
    pointsSP <- SpatialPoints(pointsDF, 
                    proj4string=CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84"))

    # Use 'over' to get _indices_ of the Polygons object containing each point 
    indices <- over(pointsSP, states_sp)

    # Return the state names of the Polygons object containing each point
    stateNames <- sapply(states_sp@polygons, function(x) x@ID)
    stateNames[indices]
}

# Test the function using points in Wisconsin and Oregon.
testPoints <- data.frame(x = c(-90, -120), y = c(44, 44))

latlong2state(testPoints)
[1] "wisconsin" "oregon" # IT WORKS

Answer 2

You can do it in a few lines of R.

library(sp)
library(rgdal)
#lat and long
Lat <- 57.25
Lon <- -9.41
#make a data frame
coords <- as.data.frame(cbind(Lon,Lat))
#and into Spatial
points <- SpatialPoints(coords)
#SpatialPolygonDataFrame - I'm using a shapefile of UK counties
counties <- readOGR(".", "uk_counties")
#assume same proj as shapefile!
proj4string(points) <- proj4string(counties)
#get county polygon point is in
result <- as.character(over(points, counties)$County_Name)

Answer 3

See ?over in the sp package. You'll need to have the state boundaries as a SpatialPolygonDataFrame.

Answer 4

Example data (polygons and points)

library(raster)
pols <- shapefile(system.file("external/lux.shp", package="raster"))
xy <- coordinates(p)

Use raster::extract

extract(p, xy)

#   point.ID poly.ID ID_1       NAME_1 ID_2           NAME_2 AREA
#1         1       1    1     Diekirch    1         Clervaux  312
#2         2       2    1     Diekirch    2         Diekirch  218
#3         3       3    1     Diekirch    3          Redange  259
#4         4       4    1     Diekirch    4          Vianden   76
#5         5       5    1     Diekirch    5            Wiltz  263
#6         6       6    2 Grevenmacher    6       Echternach  188
#7         7       7    2 Grevenmacher    7           Remich  129
#8         8       8    2 Grevenmacher   12     Grevenmacher  210
#9         9       9    3   Luxembourg    8         Capellen  185
#10       10      10    3   Luxembourg    9 Esch-sur-Alzette  251
#11       11      11    3   Luxembourg   10       Luxembourg  237
#12       12      12    3   Luxembourg   11           Mersch  233

Answer 5

It's very straightforward using sf:

library(maps)
library(sf)

## Get the states map, turn into sf object
US <- st_as_sf(map("state", plot = FALSE, fill = TRUE))

## Test the function using points in Wisconsin and Oregon
testPoints <- data.frame(x = c(-90, -120), y = c(44, 44))

# Make it a spatial dataframe, using the same coordinate system as the US spatial dataframe
testPoints <- st_as_sf(testPoints, coords = c("x", "y"), crs = st_crs(US))

#.. and perform a spatial join!
st_join(testPoints, US)


         ID        geometry
1 wisconsin  POINT (-90 44)
2    oregon POINT (-120 44)