Make a map of your study sites with an inset

Make a Map of Your Study Sites with an Inset in R

Our most recent map-making tutorial shares a useful workflow for tailoring map designs to different types of studies. You can open Map-making for ecologists, tutorial 2: Inset maps here​ or access the Map-making in R GitHub repository to download the data and code directly.

​Our first map-making tutorial provided code for basic maps of sampling sites in R. In a continued effort to demystify the world of spatial analysis, Hannah Hoff created a tutorial that builds on that foundation to share some useful functions for tailoring map designs to different types of studies.

​This tutorial builds on the "finalized" map created in the earlier post to create a map inset, which allows us to zoom in on areas of interest (sampling points, population ranges, etc.). This may be particularly useful for studies where sampling occurs in a very small area relative to the broader landscape, or in cases where there is substantial visual overlap between sample points. As some of our work in Yellowstone is focused on smaller areas, map insets have become a necessary part of our map-making pipeline!

A third tutorial, presented as a follow-up to this one, helps you make your maps look nicer using hillshade in R.