Bubble map | the R Graph Gallery

Interactive bubble maps with leaflet

The leaflet R package is a wrapper of the Javascript leaflet.js library. It allows to build stunning interactive maps in minutes with R. Maps can be exported and standalong html files, or be embeded in a R markdown file or a shiny application. Check the 3 examples below to get the basics of interactive bubble maps with R.

Add Markers

Learn how to add a marker on a map with leaflet. Circle, rectangle, pointer and more. Link it to tooltip.

Bubble map

Lear to map the marker size to a numeric value, resulting in a bubble map.

Interactive legend

You can add tags to marker and build an interactive legend that allows to toggle their visibility.

Leaflet maps are interactive. Try to zoom and drag the map below. Hover a circle to get more information about it. See Code

See Code

Static bubble maps with ggplot2

ggplot2 is probably the best option if you're looking to build a static bubble map. It offers all the flexibility of the grammar of graphic, and allow to re-use all the knowledge you learned building other types of chart with it. If you don't know about ggplot2, read this introduction.

Customization

Make your bubble map pretty: legend, backgroud, color palette and more.

Most basic

Build a scatterplot on top of a map with the usual geom_point() function.

Annotate

Annotate points as you would do on a usual scatterplot.

First bubble

Map a numeric variable to circle size and color to get your first bubble map with ggplot2 and R.

Interactive bubble map with ggplot2 and plotly

The plotly package provides the magic ggplotly() function. This function will turn any of your static bubble map made with ggplot2 interactive. With only one more line of code:

See Code

Note: try to zoom, drag, hover circle, select area and more.

Bubble map with the cartography package.

Cartography pkg

Check the cartography package to build great maps in minutes with R.

The cartography package is a great alternative to the tidyverse to build maps with R. It provides many helpers specially made for maps.