A recent article looked at producing simple maps in R. Here’s one way of doing similar things using Matlab.

These examples use the freely-available m_map package. First download this package and ensure that it is on your Matlab path (‘help addpath’).

To show the location of the IMAS Sandy Bay on a map of Australia:

m_proj('mercator','lon',[110 160],'lat',[-45 -8]);
figure
m_gshhs_i('line','Color','k') % plot coastline at intermediate resolution, as black line
hold on
ph=m_plot(147.32785,-42.901103,'r.'); % plot IMAS location
set(ph,'MarkerSize',20); % make the point larger
m_grid % add the map gridlines and tick marks

Or, in polar stereographic projection:

% use a stereographic projection centred at 90S, with a radius of 50 degrees, 
% aligned with 147.32E at the top of the page
m_proj('stereo','lat',-90,'rad',50,'lon',147.32) 
figure
m_gshhs_i('line')
hold on
ph=m_plot(147.32785,-42.901103,'r.'); 
set(ph,'MarkerSize',20);
m_grid('XAxisLocation','top') % ensure that longitude tick labels appear
% on the outside of the plot, not in the middle

Notes

• requires the Global Self-consistent Hierarchical High-resolution Shorelines data to be installed – see the m_map documentation
• see m_gshhs_i for the ‘save’ option for caching of coastline data – this is much faster if you are plotting the same coastline several times
• the GSHHS provides coastline data at a variety of resolutions (‘help m_gshhs’)
• you can control options such as the font, font size, and tick spacing via the m_grid command (‘help m_grid’)