statesRcontiguous provides a tiny (small enough for CRAN) package containing shapefiles for the following subdivisions of the United States of America:

The sources of the data in the package (and the year they were last updated) is available from the following object:

statesRcontiguous::statesrcontiguous_shapefile_details
#> # A tibble: 6 x 5
#>   path                 subdivision    type    year source                 
#>   <chr>                <chr>          <chr>  <int> <chr>                  
#> 1 data-raw/current_st… States         Shape…  2016 http://www2.census.gov…
#> 2 data-raw/current_st… States         Info    2017 https://www2.census.go…
#> 3 data-raw/current_co… Congressional… Shape…  2016 http://www2.census.gov…
#> 4 data-raw/current_co… Congressional… Info    2017 https://www2.census.go…
#> 5 data-raw/current_co… Counties       Shape…  2016 http://www2.census.gov…
#> 6 data-raw/current_co… Counties       Info    2017 https://www2.census.go…

All shapefiles include a column called contiguous.united.states which allows the dataset to be restricted to the contiguous US very simply:

library(statesRcontiguous)
library(leaflet)
shp_contiguous_states <- shp_all_us_states %>%
  filter(contiguous.united.states)
leaflet(shp_contiguous_states) %>%
  addTiles() %>%
  addPolygons()
#> Warning: sf layer has inconsistent datum (+proj=longlat +datum=NAD83 +no_defs).
#> Need '+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84'

Install from CRAN as follows:

install.packages("statesRcontiguous")

To install the development build of statesRcontiguous, please use the following:

devtools::install_github("martinjhnhadley/statesRcontiguous")

This package provides only the three shapefiles (states, congressional districts, counties) included in the package. It is intended for where you have a reproducible need for shapefiles for the (contiguous) US and don’t want to have to download the files on the fly.

You might prefer to use the tigris package which is available on CRAN, and provides tools to download any of the shapefiles from TIGER.

This package was designed for the University of Oxford’s Interactive Data Network which exists to provide a visualisation service for academics at Oxford, using Shiny. The Shiny apps developed by researchers are not allowed to contain data files, instead data must be loaded from external DOI-issuing repositories like Figshare.

By providing a small utility package with these shapefiles in, researchers can easily create choropleth of the US.

This package includes shapefiles from the US Census Bureau. All shapefiles provided by the US Census Bureau are TIGER/Line shapefiles and are offered to the public free of charge, see TIGER/Line Shapefil Technical Documentation for details.

This package itself is made available under the MIT license.