PHspdata: Philippine Administrative Boundaries

PHspdata is a lightweight R data package providing sf-compatible spatial objects for the Philippines. It serves as a streamlined resource for researchers and developers needing administrative boundaries from the national level (Level 0) down to the barangay level (Level 4).

Additionally, administrative levels 1 and 2 are augmented with longitudinal population census data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) covering the years 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2024.

Data Source & License

Primary Sources

Boundaries are sourced from the [Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX)](https://data.humdata.org/dataset/cod-ab-phl), originally provided by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and NAMRIA (last official update: November 2023).

Population data are sourced directly from the [Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) Statistical Tables](https://psa.gov.ph/statistics/population-and-housing/stat-tables) for the years 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2024.

License

The spatial data is provided under CC BY 3.0 IGO.

The census data is under the Open Data with Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

The package structure and helper function are licensed under MIT.

Modifications

Consistent with the CC BY-IGO license, the following modifications were performed:

Joined longitudinal census attributes (2010–2024) to Level 1 and Level 2 administrative boundaries.

Simplified to 2% of original vertex density using `mapshaper` to ensure high performance in R environments.

This package includes a manually updated administrative hierarchy to reflect the re-establishment of the NIR (RA 12000). The provinces of Negros Occidental, Negros Oriental, and Siquijor have been reassigned to this region within the dataset.

Coordinate precision reduced to 5 decimal places (~1.1m accuracy) for file size efficiency.

Retained essential hierarchical columns (`ADM0` through `ADM4`).