If you are new to the R programming language, like I am, you may not realize that ESRI GIS Shape files, which are used to do map layering with Latitude and Longitude coordinates, can be plotted in R. You will need to load the following packages:

library(rgdal) Bindings for Geospatial Data Package

library(rgeos): Interface to Geometry Engine

library(maptools) Spatial Tools

library(ggplot2): Popular plotting package

Coding requires pointing the R code to the directory of the shape files and other dependencies. The following data is from a GIS documents (Shapefiles and dependencies) for geospatial layers from Antarctica.

file.exists('../GIS/gis_osm_natural_a_free_1.shp')
map <- readOGR(dsn="../GIS",layer="gis_osm_natural_a_free_1",verbose=FALSE)
map_wgs84 <- spTransform(map, CRS("+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84"))
#str(map_wgs84)
#summary(map_wgs84)
write.csv(map_wgs84, "../GIS/gis_osm_natural_a_free_2.csv", row.names=TRUE)
summary(map_wgs84)
plot(map_wgs84, axes=TRUE)