Join records to local geography

Spatially joins geocoded points to a local polygon layer and returns selected geography attributes for dashboards. County and locality column names are auto-detected from common boundary schemas, or can be set explicitly.

Usage

add_local_geography(
  data,
  geography_shapes = NULL,
  county_col = NULL,
  locality_col = NULL
)

Arguments

data

A validated data frame with latitude/longitude.

geography_shapes

An sf polygon layer, or NULL to use packaged data.

county_col, locality_col

Optional explicit column names in geography_shapes. When NULL, add_local_geography() guesses from common names, preferring location_county/location_locality when present.

Value

data with location_county, location_locality, and geography_match_status. Rows without usable coordinates are kept (audit-safe) with NA geography.

Details

If geography_shapes is NULL, the function looks for a packaged local_geography dataset (for production this is the NJGIN/NJOGIS municipal boundary layer built by data-raw/local_geography.R, whose attributes are already named location_county/location_locality). Pass an sf polygon layer to adapt this join to another state, county, or service area.

For NJ production maps, location_locality is taken from an authoritative municipal boundary polygon - not from the geocoder response or Census reverse-geocoding, whose "county subdivision" names only look municipal - so every locality is traceable to a named boundary source.