ne_countries function

Get natural earth world country polygons

returns world country polygons at a specified scale, or points of tiny_countries

ne_countries(
  scale = 110,
  type = "countries",
  continent = NULL,
  country = NULL,
  geounit = NULL,
  sovereignty = NULL,
  returnclass = c("sf", "sv")
)

Arguments

• scale: The scale of map to return, one of 110, 50, 10 or small, medium, large.
• type: country type, one of 'countries', 'map_units', 'sovereignty', 'tiny_countries'
• continent: a character vector of continent names to get countries from.
• country: a character vector of country names.
• geounit: a character vector of geounit names.
• sovereignty: a character vector of sovereignty names.
• returnclass: A string determining the spatial object to return. Either "sf" for for simple feature (from sf, the default) or "sv" for a SpatVector (from terra).

Returns

An object of class sf for simple feature (from sf, the default) or SpatVector (from terra).

Details

Note that the filename of the requested object will be returned if load = FALSE.

Examples

world <- ne_countries()
africa <- ne_countries(continent = "africa")
france <- ne_countries(country = "france")

plot(world$geometry)
plot(africa$geometry)
plot(france$geometry)

# get as SpatVector
world <- ne_countries(returnclass = "sv")
terra::plot(world)

tiny_countries <- ne_countries(type = "tiny_countries", scale = 50)
plot(tiny_countries)

See Also

ne_load, pre-downloaded data are available using ne_countries, ne_states. Other geographic data are available in the raster package : getData.