Return vector of areas from SpatialPolygon object
sapply(slot(SP, "polygons"), slot, "area")
Function to clip SpatialPolygon to bbox (requires package 'raster')
gClip <- function(shp, bb){
if(class(bb) == "matrix") b_poly <- as(extent(as.vector(t(bb))), "SpatialPolygons")
else b_poly <- as(extent(bb), "SpatialPolygons")