Map making with Hillshade in R

Map-Making with Hillshade in R

Our most recent map-making tutorial focuses on unlocking the potential of rasters. You can open Map-making for ecologists, tutorial 3: Rasters: combining them, adding hillshade, and suppressing legends here​ or access the Map-making in R GitHub repository to download the data and code directly.

In this tutorial, we start by adding hillshade, which provides a clearer picture of the topography of the area by mimicking the sun's effects (illumination, shadows) on hills and mountains, which is particularly useful when mapping a place like Yellowstone National Park. However, when adding multiple layers onto a map, we suddenly end up with a number of different legends which may vary in utility and make the map look "busy." Simple functions allow us to suppress legends and guides that aren't useful, while retaining those that are. As usual, using well-documented and flexible packages like ggplot2 allow us to easily incorporate those functions, which may make downstream figure formatting more efficient.