Mapping Fall Foliage with sf

I was socially engineered by @yoniceedee into creating today’s post due to being prodded with this tweet:

Where to see the best fall foliage, based on your location: https://t.co/12pQU29ksB pic.twitter.com/JiywYVpmno

— Vox (@voxdotcom) September 18, 2017

Since there aren’t nearly enough sf and geom_sf examples out on the wild, wild #rstats web, here’s a short one that shows how to do basic sf operations, including how to plot sf objects in ggplot2 and animate a series of them with magick.

I’m hoping someone riffs off of this to make an interactive version with Shiny. If you do, definitely drop a link+note in the comments!

(If folks want some exposition here, let me know in the comments and I’ll rig up an R Markdown document with more step-by-step details.)

Full RStudio project file (with pre-cached data) is on GitHub.

library(rprojroot)
library(sf)
library(magick)
library(tidyverse) # NOTE: Needs github version of ggplot2

root <- find_rstudio_root_file()

# "borrow" the files from SmokyMountains.com, but be nice and cache them to
# avoid hitting their web server for every iteration

c("https://smokymountains.com/wp-content/themes/smcom-2015/to-delete/js/us.json",
  "https://smokymountains.com/wp-content/themes/smcom-2015/js/foliage2.tsv",
  "https://smokymountains.com/wp-content/themes/smcom-2015/js/foliage-2017.csv") %>%
  walk(~{
    sav_tmp <- file.path(root, "data", basename(.x))
    if (!file.exists(sav_tmp)) download.file(.x, sav_tmp)
  })

# next, we read in the GeoJSON file twice. first, to get the counties
states_sf <- read_sf(file.path(root, "data", "us.json"), "states", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

# we only want the continental US
states_sf <- filter(states_sf, !(id %in% c("2", "15", "72", "78")))

# it doesn't have a CRS so we give it one
st_crs(states_sf) <- 4326

# I ran into hiccups using coord_sf() to do this, so we convert it to Albers here
states_sf <- st_transform(states_sf, 5070)


# next we read in the states
counties_sf <- read_sf(file.path(root, "data", "us.json"), "counties", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
st_crs(counties_sf) <- 4326
counties_sf <- st_transform(counties_sf, 5070)

# now, we read in the foliage data
foliage <- read_tsv(file.path(root, "data", "foliage-2017.csv"),
                    col_types = cols(.default=col_double(), id=col_character()))

# and, since we have a lovely sf tidy data frame, bind it together
left_join(counties_sf, foliage, "id") %>%
  filter(!is.na(rate1)) -> foliage_sf

# now, we do some munging so we have better labels and so we can
# iterate over the weeks
gather(foliage_sf, week, value, -id, -geometry) %>%
  mutate(value = factor(value)) %>%
  filter(week != "rate1") %>%
  mutate(week = factor(week,
                       levels=unique(week),
                       labels=format(seq(as.Date("2017-08-26"),
                                         as.Date("2017-11-11"), "1 week"),
                                     "%b %d"))) -> foliage_sf

# now we make a ggplot object for each week and save it out to a png
pb <- progress_estimated(nlevels(foliage_sf$week))
walk(1:nlevels(foliage_sf$week), ~{

  pb$tick()$print()

  xdf <- filter(foliage_sf, week == levels(week)[.x])

  ggplot() +
    geom_sf(data=xdf, aes(fill=value), size=0.05, color="#2b2b2b") +
    geom_sf(data=states_sf, color="white", size=0.125, fill=NA) +
    viridis::scale_fill_viridis(
      name=NULL,
      discrete = TRUE,
      labels=c("No Change", "Minimal", "Patchy", "Partial", "Near Peak", "Peak", "Past Peak"),
      drop=FALSE
    ) +
    labs(title=sprintf("Foliage: %s ", unique(xdf$week))) +
    ggthemes::theme_map() +
    theme(panel.grid=element_line(color="#00000000")) +
    theme(panel.grid.major=element_line(color="#00000000")) +
    theme(legend.position="right") -> gg

  ggsave(sprintf("%02d.png", .x), gg, width=5, height=3)

})

# we read them all back in and animate the foliage
sprintf("%02d.png", 1:nlevels(foliage_sf$week)) %>%
  map(image_read) %>%
  image_join() %>%
  image_animate(1)