Getting Spatial in R

Abstract

R has a very rich capacity to work with, analyse, manipulate and map spatial data. Many procedures one would carry out in a GIS software, can more-or-less be performed relatively easy in R. The application of spatial data analysis in R is well documented in Bivand et al. (2008). Naturally, in DSM, we constantly work with spatial data in one form or another e.g., points, polygons, rasters. We need to do such things as import, view, and export points to, in, and from a GIS. Similarly for polygons and rasters. In this chapter we will cover the fundamentals for doing these basic operations as they are very handy skills, particularly if we want to automate procedures.