title: reading and plotting an esri shape file in R
body: <p>I'm having difficulties reading in a .shp (esri shape file) into R. I have tried several options in R, and tried to convert the shape file in ArcMap to something that correctly reads in the shape file but nothing worked yet. (In ArcMap I corrected the geometry, converted from single to multipolygon, etc which was probably not necessary or relevant)</p>
  
  <p>It probably has something to with the fact that my shape file contains 'regions' (multi-polygons) instead of 'polygons'... </p>
  
  <p>How can I read that type of shape file correctly in R for plotting? (it looks like a normal shape in ArcMap)</p>
  
  <p>In ArcMap the shape file looks like this:
  <a href="http://bfast.r-forge.r-project.org/arcmapshape.jpg" rel="noreferrer">http://bfast.r-forge.r-project.org/arcmapshape.jpg</a></p>
  
  <p>(shows a shape file with polygons within other polygons)</p>
  
  <p>In R it looks like this:
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/jRwBp.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>(shows a shape file where some polygons are wrongly filled)</p>
  
  <p>I used the following code in R:</p>
  
  <pre><code>require(maptools)
  require(rgdal)
  
  newproj &lt;- "+proj=utm +zone=55 +south +ellps=GRS80 +units=m"
  shape&lt;- readShapeSpatial(pdir, proj4string = CRS(newproj),repair=TRUE,force_ring=T,verbose=TRUE) # without any errors
  plot(shape, col="gray",border="blue", axes=TRUE)
  
  # via rgdal
  folder &lt;- c("spatial")
  lyr &lt;- c("clipped_forest_mga")
  shp &lt;- readOGR(dsn=folder,layer=lyr)
  plot(shp, col="gray",border="blue", axes=TRUE)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Both plot() commands give the same R result. No errors occur. only the following message</p>
  
  <pre><code>OGR data source with driver: ESRI Shapefile 
  Source: "P:/Victoria_DSE/BFAST_spatial/vector/PLM_excl_fire03_09_GDA94LL/mgaz94z55/clipped_EG", layer: "clipped_forest_mga"
  with 1 features and 4 fields
  Feature type: wkbMultiPolygon with 2 dimensions
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can this be solved?</p>