Overview

earthtones is an R package designed to extract color palettes from remote imagery, providing visually appealing earth-inspired color schemes.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Installation
• Usage
  • Example: Grand Canyon
  • Example: The Bahamas
  • Example: Uluru, Australia
• Using Palettes in Your Own Visualizations
  • ggplot2 Example
• Contributing
• Citation
• License

Installation

Install the released version from CRAN:

# install.packages("earthtones")

Or the latest development version from GitHub:

# remotes::install_github("traitecoevo/earthtones")

Load the package:

library("earthtones")

Usage

earthtones provides the function get_earthtones, which:

1. Downloads remote imagery from a supported provider–now using esri as default.
2. Converts image colors into a perceptually uniform color space (CIE LAB).
3. Identifies dominant colors using clustering methods (kmeans or pam).
4. Returns an aesthetically pleasing color palette.

Example: Grand Canyon

get_earthtones(latitude = 36.094994, longitude = -111.837962, 
               zoom = 12, number_of_colors = 6)

Adjust number_of_colors to control how many dominant colors are returned. The zoom parameter controls the level of detail, with larger numbers providing closer views.

Example: The Bahamas

Explore vibrant tropical colors, using the default kmeans clustering:

get_earthtones(latitude = 24.2, longitude = -77.88, zoom = 11, number_of_colors = 5,
               method="kmeans")

or use a different clustering algorithm (Partitioning Around Medoids) to choose the colors from image:

get_earthtones(latitude = 24.2, longitude = -77.88, 
               zoom = 11, number_of_colors = 5,
              method="pam")

Example: Uluru, Australia

Earth tones from the iconic Australian landscape:

get_earthtones(latitude = -25.33, longitude = 131.0396, zoom = 10, number_of_colors = 4)

Using Palettes in Your Own Visualizations

To retrieve the color palette without plotting the map, set include.map = FALSE:

palette <- get_earthtones(latitude = 24.2, longitude = -77.88,
                          zoom = 11, number_of_colors = 5,
                          include.map = FALSE)

print(palette)
#> [1] "#4A4E35" "#A5A188" "#84D4D3" "#D3DCC9" "#29B3CF"

This returns a standard R color palette ready to be used directly in your visualizations or designs.

Example with ggplot2

Here’s how you might apply the palette to a ggplot2 visualization:

library(ggplot2)

# Generate the palette
bahamas_palette <- get_earthtones(latitude = 24.2, longitude = -77.88,
                                  zoom = 11, number_of_colors = 3,
                                  include.map = FALSE)

# Example ggplot
ggplot(mtcars, aes(factor(cyl), fill = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_bar() +
  scale_fill_manual(values = bahamas_palette) +
  theme_minimal() +
  labs(title = "MTCARS Cylinders with Bahamas Earthtones",
       fill = "Cylinders")

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please report issues or suggest features on the GitHub issues page. Pull requests are also encouraged.

Citation

If you use earthtones in your research or projects, please cite it using:

citation("earthtones")
#> To cite package 'earthtones' in publications use:
#> 
#>   Cornwell W, Lyons M, Murray N (2025). _earthtones: Derive a Color
#>   Palette from a Particular Location on Earth_. R package version
#>   0.2.0, <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=earthtones>.
#> 
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#> 
#>   @Manual{,
#>     title = {earthtones: Derive a Color Palette from a Particular Location on Earth},
#>     author = {Will Cornwell and Mitch Lyons and Nick Murray},
#>     year = {2025},
#>     note = {R package version 0.2.0},
#>     url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=earthtones},
#>   }

License

This package is released under the MIT License.