iNaturalist projects are collection of records posted on iNatualist. Now that we have a R package rinat from rOpenSci I thought of playing around with the data. Here is a function I wrote, to quickly map all the records of a project using ggmap package.

library(ggmap)
library(rinat)

inatmap <- function(grpid){
  data1=get_inat_obs_project(grpid, type = "observations")
  data1=data1[which(!is.na(data1$Latitude)),]
  map <-get_map(location =c(min(data1$Longitude),
                            min(data1$Latitude),
                            max(data1$Longitude),
                            max(data1$Latitude)),
                messaging = FALSE)
  p <-ggplot()
  p= ggmap(map)+geom_point(data=data1,
                           aes(x=as.numeric(Longitude),
                               y=as.numeric(Latitude)))
  p
}

We can used get_inat_obs_project function from rinat package to get all the observation from the specified project. get_map function form ggmap package to download google maps base layer and ggplot function form ggplot2 package to actually plot the map with points.

Now call to the function with a group name will produce a map with all the records in the project.

inatmap("birdindia")

We can use other ggplot options to add title, legend etc. to the map. This is just a simple example.