Using the tidyverse with terra objects: the tidyterra package

Abstract

tidyterra is an R (R Core Team, 2023) package that allows manipulation of spatial data objects as provided by the terra package (Hijmans, 2023), using the verbs of the packages included in the tidyverse (Wickham et al., 2019), such as dplyr (Wickham, François, et al., 2023), tidyr (Wickham, Vaughan, et al., 2023), or tibble (Müller & Wickham, 2023). This addition enables users that are already familiar with the tidyverse to approach spatial data manipulation and analysis more easily and much faster. Furthermore, tidyterra extends the functionality of the ggplot2 package (Wickham, 2016) by providing additional geoms and stats 1 like geom_spatraster() and geom_spatvector(), as well as carefully chosen scales and color palettes specifically designed for map production. tidyterra can manipulate the following classes of terra objects: 1. SpatVector objects, which represent vector data such as points, lines, or polygon geometries. 2. SpatRaster objects, which represent raster data in the form of a grid consisting of equally sized rectangles. Each rectangle can contain one or more values. The first stable version of tidyterra was included on CRAN on April 24, 2022, and has been actively used by other packages (such as ebvcuve (Quoss et al., 2021), biomod2 (Thuiller et al.