Glyphosate has hogged the limelight recently due to listing as a possible carcinogen by the World Health Organization's IARC. I got curious about pesticide usage patterns in the US and plotting this data with interactive maps in R-Shiny, using leaflet, for example.
County-level estimates of pesticide usage can be found here: https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/pnsp/usage/maps/county-level/
The data are reported using State/County FIPS codes. I require lat-long coordinates to show the data.
It seems possible to go from lat-long to FIPS quite easily, as illustrated by this API here: https://geo.fcc.gov/api/census/
How to go in the reverse direction?
解决方案
The solution I found required using a REST API from here.com of the five options (below). I first cross-referenced FIPS codes from USGS table with County and State names using table fips_codes from library(tigris). This gave me names to put together in address lines, like Boulder County, CO. Next, I wrote a small function here_now with sample usage as:
here_now("Boulder+County,+CO") # $lat: 40.08791; $lon: -105.3447
Implementation is a call to the REST API using fromJSON from library(jsonlite)
here_now
AppCode
AppID
rootURL
app_id = paste("app_id", AppID, sep="=")
app_code = paste("app_code", AppCode, sep="=")
searchtext = paste("searchtext", searchtext, sep="=")
request
response = fromJSON(request)
res
res$lat
res$lon
res
}
Further, I used the FCC's reverse geo-coding API to validate: https://geo.fcc.gov/api/census/
Options I experimented with for geocoding included:
- google APIs via ggmap (requires API key, requires credit card)
- mapquest API (requires API key, no credit card needed)
- Data Science Toolkit's RDSK implementation
- Geonames service via eponymous R package
- Here APIs (require AppID and AppCode, freemium model)