Displaying Your Data in Google Earth Using R2G2
From the post:
Have you ever wanted to easily visualize your ecology data in Google Earth? R2G2 is a new package for R, available via R CRAN and formally described in this Molecular Ecology Resources article, which provides a user-friendly bridge between R and the Google Earth interface. Here, we will provide a brief introduction to the package, including a short tutorial, and then encourage you to try it out with your own data!
Nils Arrigo, with some help from Loren Albert, Mike Barker, and Pascal Mickelson (one of the contributors to Recology), has created a set of R tools to generate KML files to view data with geographic components. Instead of just telling you what the tools can do, though, we will show you a couple of examples using publically available data. Note: a number of individual files are linked to throughout the tutorial below, but just in case you would rather download all the tutorial files in one go, have at it (tutorial zip file).
Among the basic tools in R2G2 is the ability to place features—like dots, shapes, or images (including plots you produced in R)— that represent discrete observations at specific geographical locations. For example, in the figure below, we show the migratory path of a particular turkey vulture in autumn of three successive years (red = 2009; blue = 2010; green = 2011).
If researchers can track and visualize a single turkey vulture’s migration, across two continents, tracking and visualizing the paths, routes, and routines of other entities should be a matter of data collection.