Combining Geometries in Shapefile by Grouping Variable Using R

Question

Here is a simple example. I have a shapefile of three US states:

This is the code that creates the shapefile.

library(USAboundaries)
library(sf)
library(dplyr)

states <- us_states(map_date = "2000-01-01", resolution = "high", states = c("CA", "OR", "WA")) %>%
  mutate(group_var = if_else(state_abbr == "CA", 1, 2))
plot(st_geometry(states))

Now, I'm trying to combine the geometries based on the value of group_var, so California should stand alone while Oregon and Washington get lumped together into a single geometry. Unfortunately, st_combine doesn't take a grouping variable, and although the aggregate function in sf looks promising, code like this throws an error that group_var cannot be found.

x <- aggregate(states, group_var, mean)

Furthermore, aggregate requires a function as a third argument, presumably because aggregate in the stats package applies the function to the data, but in this case, there isn't any data to apply a function to. I'm just trying to combine/aggregate the shapefiles.

Answer 1

You could also do this using dplyr's group_by() and summarize() functions:

states %>%
  group_by(group_var) %>% 
  summarize(geometry = st_union(geometry))