Add a box for the NA values to the ggplot legend for a continous map

Question

I have got a map with a legend gradient and I would like to add a box for the NA values. My question is really similar to this one and this one. Also I have read this topic, but I can't find a "nice" solution somewhere or maybe there isn't any?

Here is an reproducible example:

library(ggplot2)
map <- map_data("world")
map$value <- setNames(sample(-50:50, length(unique(map$region)), TRUE), 
                      unique(map$region))[map$region]
map[map$region == "Russia", "value"] <- NA
ggplot() +
  geom_polygon(data = map,
               aes(long, lat, group = group, fill = value)) +
  scale_fill_gradient2(low = "brown3", mid = "cornsilk1", high = "turquoise4",
                       limits = c(-50, 50),
                       na.value = "black")

So I would like to add a black box for the NA value for Russia. I know, I can replace the NA's by a number, so it will appear in the gradient and I think, I can write a workaround like the following, but all this workarounds do not seem like a pretty solution for me and also I would like to avoid "senseless" warnings:

ggplot() +
  geom_polygon(data = map,
               aes(long, lat, group = group, fill = value)) +
  scale_fill_gradient2(low = "brown3", mid = "cornsilk1", high = "turquoise4",
                       limits = c(-50, 50),
                       na.value = "black") +
  geom_point(aes(x = -100, y = -50, size = "NA"), shape = NA, colour = "black") +
  guides(size = guide_legend("NA", override.aes = list(shape = 15, size = 10)))
Warning messages:
1: Using size for a discrete variable is not advised. 
2: Removed 1 rows containing missing values (geom_point).

I unfortunately miss reputation points to comment posted answers, but I think there is a little mistake in the top answer from @bdemarest: for the "Another solution", in the code line guides(colour=guide_legend("No data", override.aes=list(colour="black"))). in override.aes, colour should not be used. It should be fill otherwise the color of the box will be black by default I guess, and with colouryou just change the colorbox contour to black. So I suggest a line replacement in the answer as followed: guides(colour=guide_legend("No data", override.aes=list(fill="black"))) — Yoann Pageaud
@YoannPageaud, Yes, good point. I did some experimenting while testing your proposed change. I found that the entire line guides(...) is not really needed. The same plot is created after removing that line and changing the previous line to scale_colour_manual(values=NA, name="No data"). It's possible that I was just mistaken, or that changes to ggplot2 in the last 2 years are responsible. — bdemarest

bdemarest bdemarest · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-22T01:18:06

One approach is to split your value variable into a discrete scale. I have done this using cut(). You can then use a discrete color scale where "NA" is one of the distinct colors labels. I have used scale_fill_brewer(), but there are other ways to do this.

map$discrete_value = cut(map$value, breaks=seq(from=-50, to=50, length.out=8))

p = ggplot() +
    geom_polygon(data=map, aes(long, lat, group=group, fill=discrete_value)) +
    scale_fill_brewer(palette="RdYlBu", na.value="black") +
    coord_quickmap()

ggsave("map.png", plot=p, width=10, height=5, dpi=150)

Another solution

Because the original poster said they need to retain the color gradient scale and the colorbar-style legend, I am posting another possible solution. It has 3 components:

We need to trick ggplot into drawing a separate color scale by using aes() to map something to color. I mapped a column of empty strings using aes(colour="").
To ensure that we do not draw a colored boundary around each polygon, I specified a manual color scale with a single possible value, NA.
Finally, guides() along with override.aes is used to ensure the new color legend is drawn as the correct color.

p2 = ggplot() +
     geom_polygon(data=map, aes(long, lat, group=group, fill=value, colour="")) +
     scale_fill_gradient2(low="brown3", mid="cornsilk1", high="turquoise4",
                     limits=c(-50, 50), na.value="black") +
     scale_colour_manual(values=NA) +              
     guides(colour=guide_legend("No data", override.aes=list(colour="black")))

ggsave("map2.png", plot=p2, width=10, height=5, dpi=150)

Add a box for the NA values to the ggplot legend for a continous map

2 Answers

Another solution