ggplot2countryborderlessworld-map

Remove countries' political borders from ggplot2 map


I need to remove the political borders of the countries from the following ggplot2 map:

library(ggplot2)

world = map_data('world')

plot=ggplot() +
geom_polygon(data=world, aes(x=long, y=lat, group=group), fill='NA', color='black', size=0.2)

print(plot)

enter image description here

Any suggestion on how I can do this? Thanks


Solution

  • There are two workarounds to your question:

    First workaround: Using maps instead of ggplot2

    library(maps)    
    world <- maps::map("world", fill=FALSE, plot=TRUE, interior = FALSE)
    

    Which results in:

    enter image description here

    Second workaround: Using maps and ggplot2

    library(maps)
    library(magrittr)
    library(maptools)
    library(raster)
    library(ggplot2)
    
    #Defining a general CRS
    mycrs <- "+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs"
    
    #Using the original maps package, then converting map into SpatialPolygons object
    world <- maps::map("world", fill=TRUE) %$% 
      maptools::map2SpatialPolygons(., IDs=names,proj4string=CRS(mycrs))
    
    #The resulting map has self intersection problems so any further operation reports errors; using buffers of width 0 is a fast fix
    while(rgeos::gIsValid(world)==FALSE){
      world <- rgeos::gBuffer(world, byid = TRUE, width = 0, quadsegs = 5, capStyle = "ROUND")
    }
    
    #Dissolving polygon's limits
    world <- raster::aggregate(world)
    
    #Plotting. I add theme_void to your code to erase any axis, etc
    ggplot() +
      geom_polygon(data = world, aes(x=long, y=lat, group=group), fill='NA', color='black', size=0.2)+
      theme_void()
    

    The result:

    enter image description here

    Hope it helps