Seeking up-to-date shapefile of Sierra Leone

Question

I'm looking for a current map of Sierra Leone provinces (admin 1 level). One province split in 2017, making a total of 5, but I can only find files with 4 provinces.

I've checked humdata, DIVA-GIS, and GADM, and they're all out-of-date . As far as I can tell, there isn't a way to have only admin borders on the OpenStreetMap/Geofabrik data set.

Alternately, is there any workaround? I don't need much, just the polygons for the provinces. This is for use in a scientific manuscript. Ultimately, I want to import it into R and add data to it. Thanks!

Answer 1

Let's try to find the boundaries within OSM data :).

library(osmdata)

bbox <- matrix(data = c(6.9, -14, 10, -10), nrow = 2, ncol = 2)

boundaries <- opq(bbox, timeout = 240) |>
  add_osm_feature (key = "boundary", value = "administrative") |>
  osmdata_sf()

boundary=administrative is the key to look for. You can add another condition here like admin_level=4 as main provinces are on level 4, however we will use other level for the whole country as well.

sl <- boundaries$osm_multipolygons |>
  subset(admin_level == 2 & name == "Sierra Leone") |>
  subset(select = c(osm_id, name))

sl |>
  sf::st_geometry() |>
  plot(col = "lightblue")

Now, let's filter out the provinces:

provinces <- boundaries$osm_multipolygons |>
  subset(admin_level == 4)

and restrict only to those, which are within Sierra Leone

provinces <- provinces |>
  subset(apply(sf::st_within(provinces, sl, sparse = FALSE), 1, any)) |>
  subset(select = c(osm_id, name))

provinces |>
  sf::st_geometry() |>
  plot(col = RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(5,"Greens"), add = TRUE)

Hope it helps :).