Assign country names to long and lat in R

Question

I have gridded data on temperature, from which I want to extract data for specific countries. Put it in another way, I want to kind of assign country names to the coordinates (long and lat). The way I am trying to accomplish it:

library(gapminder)
df = map_data("world") %>% select(long, lat, region)  
r = rasterFromXYZ(df)

If I got a raster from df, then I could adjust the resolution and extent to merge it with my data on temperature. Then, I could convert it to a dataframe and subset by country. But when I try to raster df, I get an error message:

"Error in rasterFromXYZ(df) : x cell sizes are not regular".

How can I make it regular? Or is there any other easy way to assign country names to the coordinates?

Answer 1

You can use the geonames package to query the geonames.org server:

> library(geonames)
> options(geonamesUsername="getafreeusernamefromgeonames.org")
> GNcountryCode(lat=54, lng=-2)
$languages
[1] "en-GB,cy-GB,gd"

$distance
[1] "0"

$countryCode
[1] "GB"

$countryName
[1] "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"

Note that locations in the sea will trigger an error, which you'll have to trap if you are in a loop (you can only do one query at a time):

> GNcountryCode(lat=0, lng=0)
Error in getJson("countryCode", list(lat = lat, lng = lng, radius = radius,  : 
  error code 15 from server: no country code found

Answer 2

Please put the libraries in your code, or use ::; it's time consuming to have to infer what packages might be in your namespace.

Your data is irregular points. If you just want them in a dataframe, then covert them to sf or sp objects. Your data values are also nominal, so unless you want to calculate proportions there's no sensible way to convert that to a raster.

To join country names to your data I recommned rnaturalearth, my solution also uses sf

library(dplyr)
library(gapminder)
library(ggplot2)
library(magrittr)
library(sf)
library(rnaturalearth)


dfr <- map_data("world") %>% select(long, lat, region)
sfRegion <- st_as_sf(dfr, coords=c('long', 'lat'))
sfCountry <- ne_countries(returnclass='sf')
sfJoined <- st_join(sfCountry, sfRegion)

As it turns out, the rnaturalearth data has a lot of detail on regions and subregions, so you may could just use it. I don't know about map_data but it might also have country names already available.