Lab 5

Author

Your Name

Published

Invalid Date

Before your start the lab notebook

  • Update the header - put your name in the author argument and put today’s date in the date argument.
  • Click the “Render” button in RStudio and then open the rendered 5-lab5.html page.
  • Then go back and try changing the theme argument in the header to something else - you can see other available themes here. Notice the difference when you render now!

Lab 5: Mapping Water Insecurity with tidycensus and ggplot2

In this lab, you will recreate a public map visualization of plumbing access across the U.S. using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) via the tidycensus package. You will:

  • Use get_acs() to retrieve county-level data
  • Clean and reshape the data
  • Visualize the spatial distribution of plumbing access using ggplot2
  • Create a choropleth map
  • Complete a short design challenge to create your own variation of the map

Reference Tutorial:

Mapping water insecurities in R with tidycensus

Suggested Reading:

1 Load Libraries & Set Up

Code 
library(tidyverse)
library(tidycensus)
library(sf)
library(ggthemes)
library(viridis)

# In .Renviron
# CENSUS_API_KEY="your census"

census_api_key(Sys.getenv("CENSUS_API_KEY"), install = TRUE, overwrite = TRUE)
#> [1] ""

2 Acquire the Data

Use get_acs() to retrieve county-level data for the Western states in 2022 and 2023:

  • Total population: B01003_001

  • Households without plumbing: B25016_003

Code 
# your code here, or use the code from tutorial

3 Pivot the data wider and calculate the percent of people without plumbing

Pivot the data wider so that each row contains both population and plumbing information. Check your result using glimpse() or summary().

Code 
# your code here, or use the code from tutorial

4 Create a choropleth map showing % without plumbing.

In this tutorial, they use geom_sf() to make choropleth map, but you can also use tmap() like we covered in the lecture if you prefer.

Code 
# your code here, or use the code from tutorial

What does this preview map show? Are there clear spatial patterns?

NoteYour Answer

Type your response here.

5 Refined Choropleth Map

Recreate the polished map from the USGS tutorial. Consider:

  • Restricting to western U.S. states (AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NM, NV, OR, UT, WA, WY)
  • Adjusting the color scale
  • Adding meaningful titles and captions
Code 
# your code here, or use the code from tutorial

What refinements did you add in step 5 compared to step 4? How do these changes improve the visualization?

NoteYour Answer

Type your response here.

6 Create Your Own Map

Use the same dataset and design a different map. Possibilities include:

  • Plotting absolute number of people without plumbing
  • Faceting by region or state or urban/rural classification
  • Changing map projection or styling
Code 
# your code here
NoteYour Interpretation

explain what your new visualization shows.

Save and Push Your Work

Remember to save your .qmd and render the HTML output before committing to GitHub.

Code 
git add 5-lab5.qmd 5-lab5.html
git commit -m "Final submission for Lab5"
git push