How to add continuous color legend to an R map made with maps

Question

I'm using the R code shown below, which loads libraries maps and RColorBrewer, to create a map of the world with countries color-coded by population rank. As you can see in the image below, I'm using a green palette in which the darker the green, the larger the population.

I'd like to add a continuous color legend showing the full palette to denote that light green = small population and dark green = large population, but I can't find a way to do it via maps. Could you tell me what is the easiest way to add a continuous color legend (or color key/color scale) to my map?

# Load libraries
library(maps)
library(RColorBrewer)

# Load world data
data(world.cities)

# Calculate world population by country
world.pop = aggregate(x=world.cities$pop, by=list(world.cities$country.etc),
                      FUN=sum)
world.pop = setNames(world.pop, c('Country', 'Population'))

# Create a color palette
palette = colorRampPalette(brewer.pal(n=9, name='Greens'))(nrow(world.pop))

# Sort the colors in the same order as the countries' populations
palette = palette[rank(-world.pop$Population)]

# Draw a map of the world
map(database='world', fill=T, col=palette, bg='light blue')

Answer 1

Within the library SDMTools there is the function legend.gradient

adding this code to the end of your code should give the desired result:

# Draw a map of the world
map(database='world', fill=T, col=palette, bg='light blue')
x = c(-20, -15, -15, -20)
y = c(0, 60, 60, 0)
legend.gradient(cbind(x = x - 150, y = y - 30), 
                  cols = brewer.pal(n=9, name='Greens'), title = "TITLE", limits = "")

You will need to fiddle with the x & y coordinates to get the legend into the desired location however.

EDIT

The x and y coordinates also adjust the shape of the box so I changed the code so that the box shape would not change if you only alter the numbers within the legend.gradient function. Below is what this code should produce