Plotting terra rasters

This article shows how to plot the SpatRaster produced by rasterpic_img() with several packages.

Base plots

The most straightforward option is to use the base plot() methods provided by the package terra (terra::plotRGB()):

library(rasterpic)
library(terra)

# The flag of the United Kingdom
img <- system.file("img/UK_flag.png",
  package = "rasterpic"
)

uk <- sf::st_read(
  system.file("gpkg/UK.gpkg",
    package = "rasterpic"
  ),
  quiet = TRUE
)

uk_img <- rasterpic_img(uk, img, mask = TRUE, inverse = TRUE)
plotRGB(uk_img)

Figure 1: Plot with terra package

With ggplot2 + tidyterra

tidyterra provides full support for terra SpatRaster objects:

library(ggplot2)
library(tidyterra)

ggplot() +
  geom_spatraster_rgb(data = uk_img)

Figure 2: Plot with tidyterra package

With tmap

tmap can also be used to create great maps:

library(tmap)

tm_shape(uk_img) +
  tm_graticules() +
  tm_rgb()

Figure 3: Plot with tmap package

With mapsf

mapsf also provides this functionality:

library(mapsf)

mf_raster(uk_img)
mf_scale()

mf_inset_on(x = "worldmap", pos = "topright")
mf_worldmap(uk)
mf_inset_off()

Figure 4: Plot with mapsf package

With maptiles

maptiles is an interesting package that provides the ability to download map tiles from different providers. It also has a specific function for plotting terra SpatRaster objects:

library(maptiles)

other_tile <- get_tiles(uk, crop = TRUE, zoom = 6)

other_tile_crop <- terra::crop(other_tile, uk_img)

plot_tiles(other_tile_crop)
plot_tiles(uk_img, add = TRUE)

Figure 5: Plot with maptiles package

References

Tennekes M (2018). “tmap: Thematic Maps in R.” Journal of Statistical Software, 84(6), 1–39. doi:10.18637/jss.v084.i06.

Giraud T (2026). mapsf: Thematic Cartography. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.mapsf.

Hernangómez D (2023). “Using the tidyverse with terra objects: the tidyterra package.” Journal of Open Source Software, 8(91), 5751. ISSN 2475-9066, doi:10.21105/joss.05751, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05751.

Hijmans R, Brown A, Barbosa M (2026). terra: Spatial Data Analysis. R package version 1.9-1, https://rspatial.org/.

Wickham H (2016). ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Springer-Verlag New York. ISBN 978-3-319-24277-4, https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org.