Standard for publication-ready R-based geographic images?

Question

I've been using the ggmap package to create figures that will go in journal articles for many years. These maps are a little harder to create than Leaflet maps, and as OpenStreetMap and Google have both shut down their tile APIs, getting background tiles that work for me has become more difficult. (Stamen is okay, but the selections don't always work).

I've seen ways to export leaflet maps as static images, but these often leave artifacts like zoom buttons that I definitely don't want in my paper. What is the best tool now (2019) for creating clean, publication-quality geographic images in R?

As a further complication, I usually write my articles in rmarkdown so that my figures can update with changes to the data, research, etc. Taking a screenshot of a leaflet map where I just crop out the things I don't want isn't ideal.

Answer 1

It is possible to use basemaps in the non-interactive mode of the tmap package. However, it requires two steps:

1. Downloading/preparing raster data with three layers (RGB)
2. Start making the map with tm_shape(my_rgb_data) + tm_rgb()

You can see some examples of using this approach at https://stackoverflow.com/a/56972352/2602477.