Coastlines
We’ll use coastline data from the Natural Earth to represent the coastline of the northwest Atlantic (mid-Atlantic states to southern maritime provinces).
The data are in the public domain which means they are free to downlaod and use. It also means the citation (or attribution) is voluntary. The authors of Natural Earth have suggestions about how to cite the data.
Here we show how to very simple load the data at three different resolutions (coarse, medium and detail). We have used the (rnaturalearth R package)[https://github.com/ropensci/rnaturalearth] in conjunction with the sf R package to crop and simplify data for this project.
coarse = read_coastline("coarse")
medium = read_coastline("medium")
detail = read_coastline("detail")
plot(coarse, col = "gray", lwd = 7, axes = TRUE, reset = FALSE)
plot(medium, col = "orange", lwd = 4, add = TRUE)
plot(detail, col = "purple", lwd = 1, add = TRUE)
You can see that the coarse is very much cartoon-ish, but medium and detail are pretty close. Because medium and detail are so close, we set the default to medium, but you can chose which makes sense for you.