Bikepacking maps

Creating daily multipanel maps, elevation diagramms and summaries in one plot for a bikepacking trip from .gpx tracks. The project uses the R-Ecosystem while relying heavily on the following packages:

• sf for handling spatial vector data
• raster for handling spatial raster data
• ggplot2 to draw the beautiful multipanel graphics and its extensions for spatial data:
  • ggspatial
  • ggmap

Motivation

After a two months bikepacking trip from southern Germany to the atlantic coast of Portugal, I wanted to prepare a slideshow of photos ordered by date including a daily infographic which should display the following:

• A Map of the route travelled this day
• A small inlet, locating the route in western Europe
• a summary on accomodation and hosts
• The statistics distance travelled and elevation gain
• an elevation profile

An example generated from the scripts looks like this:

Data

The project used the following data sources:

• .gpx track files containing the routes in EPSG:4326.
• DEM-Tiles in the geotiff raster format from the Platform for Big Data in Agriculture. EPSG:4326. Resolution 5 * 5 deg (90m at the equator)
• Location Names queried using the revgeo-package
• Accommodation and Hosts were entered from handwritten notes into a prompt from one of the functions

Workflow

1. 00_packages.R: includes a vector of all necessary packages and installs if necessary. Saves the vector of packages as an .RData file
2. 01_data_wrangling_feature_engineering.R:

• reads the .gpx tracks and stores them as Linestrings in a simple-feature-collection (sfc). An sfc which is a data-frame like object with a column containing the georeferenced coordinates of the linestring. The sfc contains one row for each route
• extracts start and stop locations from the tracks and queries the names of the locations using the revgeo-package and stores these in a second sfc
• Casts the first sfc of Linestrings to a Point-sfc for each track and extracts elevation data for each point. The elevation gain is calculated

3. 02_layout_plots.R:

• creates a map of the track with a background using the ggmap-API and the location names of the start and stop of the day
• a line-graph of the elevation profile
• small inlet, locating the route in western Europe
• information on elevation gain, distance travelled, accommodation, hosts etc.
• assembles these into a multipanel plot object

4. 03_order_plots_photos.R extracts the information of the date and time from the photos and renames the photos according to this, so that these can be displayed in slideshow together with the plots