Photo of Andy Arthur

Andy Arthur

The color television assures us that April showers bring May flowers. 🌷🌻🌼 I'll believe it when I see it, though there are definite hints of the green up -- grass is looking greener in the city, some bushes are starting to bloom and there are signs of the days to come. Days have gotten longer, windows open and it's generally just nicer then not that long ago.

Within a 10 Minute Walk to a Supermarket

Within a 10 Minute Walk to a Supermarket

If you don't own a car, there is only a few parts of Albany where you can walk a short distance to get to a supermarket.

Green areas are those within a 10 minute walk of a major supermarket -- Price Chopper, Hannaford, Tops, Shop-Rite, or Walmart.

Pok-o-Moonshine

Ortho Pok-o-Moonshine

Pok-o-Moonshine with the Adirondack Northway running along it in the Northern Adirondacks.

Shoreline

Sitting along the shore of Cod Pond, right where the trail ends. There is a large rock to sit on or fish from.

Taken on Sunday April 19, 2020 at Cod Pond.

Make Your Maps in QGIS but use R and Tidycensus to Generate Census Shapefiles πŸ—Ί

Make Your Maps in QGIS but use R and Tidycensus to Generate Census Shapefiles πŸ—Ί

Why choose when you can have it all? Seriously, QGIS makes it easy to move labels as you like and do the styling of the Shapefile or GeoPackage you generate in R with tidycensus and sf.

library(tidycensus)
library(sf)

lowincome <- get_acs(
  geography = “state”,
  table = ‘B19001’,
  year = 2020,
  output = ‘wide’,
  survey = “acs5”,
  geometry = TRUE);

lowincome$under30k <- ((lowincome$B19001_002E+lowincome$B19001_003E+lowincome$B19001_004E+lowincome$B19001_005E+lowincome$B19001_006E)/lowincome$B19001_001E)*100

lowincome %>% write_sf(‘/tmp/under30k.gpkg’)

With the above R code, it will generate a GeoPackage (use extension .gpkg) or Shapefile (use extension .shp) you can use to make your map in QGIS. Then in QGIS if you want to simplify the output, you can use a geometry generator in the styles:

simplify($geometry,0.003)

Or you can specify the simplification in the R script when you run get_acs(), as it is a wrapper around the tigris package:

lowincome <- get_acs(
  geography = “state”,
  table = ‘B19001’,
  year = 2020,
  output = ‘wide’,
  survey = “acs5”,
  geometry = TRUE,
  resolution = ’20m’,
);

Neat ! R and QGIS are great tool to use together.