arcgisbinding: An R package for integrating R and ArcGIS

Abstract

The open-source geospatial analysis ecosystem in the R language has been growing exponentially, making R a key aspect of statistical analysis in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this paper, we present arcgisbinding, an open-source R package for R-ArcGIS integration, and its functionality, architecture, and use cases for environmental modeling applications. Integrating R and ArcGIS provides rich end-to-end geospatial analysis workflows and enables a variety of curated spatial and spatiotemporal data in Esri formats for use in the R community. arcgisbinding supports geospatial data input and output (I/O), on-the-fly data manipulation, conversion to frequently used spatial R data formats, and interactive data mapping capabilities via esri.leaflet. The package allows the creation of R-driven geoprocessing tools, R script tools, that can be executed in ArcGIS. Different integration patterns between R and ArcGIS are elaborated with a case study on modeling coral bleaching severity using near-live data feeds from NOAA's Coral Reef Watch.