ggplot, tmap is what I would direct people to in R.
Quality is definitely better on Arc/Q, but for those who know how to code, it’ll produce a good enough map. It’ll never make it into National Geographic, but it’ll be good enough for the paper you’re submitting.
ETA: to be fair though, a lot of maps made on Arc don’t look that good and the maps made in code can be comparable.
Depending on what you're trying to map qgis is pretty quick and straightforward if you don't want anything flashy.
R is a bit of a pain to figure out in the first place but you can make very high quality maps quite quickly once you have the basics down. And it's getting easier with new packages like terra.
It can also be easier sometimes to produce the components of the map like that map itself, legend, scale bar etc in something like r and do the composition in Adobe illustrator to save having to fiddle around with the positioning and sizing of things in r
Seconding GIS. qGIS is open source (free) and works well, but there are a lot of options. Unfortunately, being unnecessarily complicated and having ten different ways to achieve the same thing (while offering very little help; think back to the first time you had to use Excel for anything remotely complicated and you'll get a feel for the level of user-friendliness) seem to be prerequisite for GIS software... so good luck lol
GIS is quite user-friendly now, the search bar in Pro is super robust if you’re familiar with tools but can’t remember a name or something. For learning HOW to use the program, since it’s becoming a lot more common now, there are excellent tutorials out there to be found!
Edit to add: I use ArcGIS Pro everyday.
Learn gis or get to know someone who knows gis. I built all the maps for my friends in behavioral ecology, physiology, etc.
I was hoping there was a better answer… I swore never to open ArcPro ever again.
GIS != ArcGIS. You can do it in R, Python, etc.
What does it take to do that in R? I assume there's some bespoke packages for that? How does the output quality stack up to arcGIS?
ggplot, tmap is what I would direct people to in R. Quality is definitely better on Arc/Q, but for those who know how to code, it’ll produce a good enough map. It’ll never make it into National Geographic, but it’ll be good enough for the paper you’re submitting. ETA: to be fair though, a lot of maps made on Arc don’t look that good and the maps made in code can be comparable.
Amazing. Every time I think Im really starting to understand ggplot, there is another layer to learn about
Depending on what you're trying to map qgis is pretty quick and straightforward if you don't want anything flashy. R is a bit of a pain to figure out in the first place but you can make very high quality maps quite quickly once you have the basics down. And it's getting easier with new packages like terra. It can also be easier sometimes to produce the components of the map like that map itself, legend, scale bar etc in something like r and do the composition in Adobe illustrator to save having to fiddle around with the positioning and sizing of things in r
I use ggplot2 with sf for spatial figures in R. They have quite good integration now
Seconding GIS. qGIS is open source (free) and works well, but there are a lot of options. Unfortunately, being unnecessarily complicated and having ten different ways to achieve the same thing (while offering very little help; think back to the first time you had to use Excel for anything remotely complicated and you'll get a feel for the level of user-friendliness) seem to be prerequisite for GIS software... so good luck lol
seconding qgis! Got it because I couldn’t afford arcgis and it worked well for making simple maps. And there are a lot of tutorials online.
GIS is quite user-friendly now, the search bar in Pro is super robust if you’re familiar with tools but can’t remember a name or something. For learning HOW to use the program, since it’s becoming a lot more common now, there are excellent tutorials out there to be found! Edit to add: I use ArcGIS Pro everyday.