R Spatial Analysis Notes

rspatialresources.md

R Spatial Analysis Notes

Spatial Analysis in R

Key Packages

• sp - defines the set of base classes for spatial data in R. Most useful for creating, converting, merging, transforming (e.g. projection), and plotting (see spplot) Spatial* objects.
• rgdal - wrapper for GDAL. Most useful for reading in vector data (e.g. ESRI Shapefiles, GeoJSON, KML) with the function readOGR and reading raster data (e.g. NetCDF, GeoTiff) with the function readGDAL.
• rgeos - wrapper for the GEOS library. Most useful for common spatial operations such as calculating distances between objects, areas, intersections, buffers, centroids, etc. See help(package = "rgeos") for a complete list of functions.
• raster - provides a set of object classes and functions specific to working with raster data. Most useful for loading, transforming, and analyzing raster data. A particularly useful function getData retrieves commonly used spatial data such as administrative boundaries or world climate data.

R Spatial Resources

• "Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R" [Book Website][Springer Link] by Roger S. Bivand, Edzer Pebesma, and Virgilio Gómez-Rubio. Perhaps the best and most comprehensive introduction to Spatial* objects in R by the authors of the sp package.
• CRAN Task View: Analysis of Spatial Data - lists available R packages by spatial application.
• Stack Overflow Geographic Information Systems - Invaluable Q&A community and knowledge base. This is often the best place to look for solutions to a specific but common task.
• Visual Raster Cheatsheet by Etienne B. Racine

R Spatial Tutorials

• Applied Spatial Data Science with R by Daniel Emaasit
• Introduction to visualising spatial data in R by Robin Lovelace and James Chesire.
  • PDF
• GIS in R by Nick Eubank
• Spatial data in R: Using R as a GIS by Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez
• R Spatial Tips - spatial.ly by James Cheshire.
• R Spatial Cheatsheet by Barry Rowlingson
• Geocoding with R's ggmap Package by Zev Ross
• plotting polygon shapefiles with ggplot2

Spatial Visualization and Mapping

• Making Maps in R by Kevin Johnson
• Mapping in R using the ggplot2 package by Zev Ross
• Introduction to Spatial Data and ggplot2 by James Chesire
• Using R — Working with Geospatial Data (and ggplot2) by Bethany Yollin
• Making Maps with R by Kim Gilbert
• Create Maps With R Geospatial Classes and Graphics Tools - UCSB National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
• Spatial maps and geocoding in R by Aedin Culhane
• choroplethr by Ari Lamstein (choropleth mapping)
  • In addition to the GitHub documentation, Lamstein has many tutorial and examples in his blog

General R Resources

Basics

• The very basics of R - UCLA Statistics
• R Tutorial by Kelly Black
• CRAN R Reference Card (excellent coverage of commonly used base R functions)
• RStudio Cheatsheets (RStudio IDE, visualization, data cleaning, etc.) by RStudio
• A section on R Basics from "R Graphics Cookbok" by Winston Chang

Data Visualization

• R Graphics Cookbook by Winston Chang
• ggplot2
  • package documentation
  • GitHub wiki
  • ggplot2 cheatsheet
  • ggplot2 tagged questions on StackOverflow

Advanced

• dplyr introduction (powerful tools for processing, cleaning, and analyzing tabular data) by Hadley Wickham
  • dplyr databases vignette
• stargazer cheatsheet (publication quality formatting for regression results) by Jake Russ
• knitr resources (dynamic document compilation / reproducible research) by Yihui Xie.
• packrat (dependency management / reproducibility tool) by RStudio.
• Advanced R by Hadley Wickham
• R Packages (package development) by Hadley Wickham

General GIS Resources

• GIS Analysis for Applied Economists by Melissa Dell.

General Data Analysis Resources

• Tidy Data Wickham (2014). Journal of Statistical Software.