2.1 The mapping landscape has changed!
Over the last decade it has become increasingly easy to create and edit maps. As explained by Mark Zastrow in “Science on the Map”, the mapping landscape has dramatically changed over the last decade. Scientists can now readily draw valuable spatial representations of their work, even with large data sets and perform powerful analyses using specific packages of programming languages such as R and Python. In order to give you a taste of the diversity of tool to manipulate, analyze and visualize geographic information, we listed a few software available:
2.1.4 Free GIS data
If you are looking for free GIS data, you should definitively start by carefully
examine the resources listed on this page: https://freegisdata.rtwilson.com/.
Note that in R the function getData() from the raster package is fantastic and
some R packages are great data provider, for instance, osmdata (see below).