Introduction to Spatial Analysis in R

D March, J Duffy & Chris Yeomans

04/10/2019

1 Introduction

In this workshop we are going to work with vector data (points, lines and polygons) and raster data. R has an extraordinary potential to handle this data and perform complex spatial operations like other Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software.

We will explore the capacities of R to handle and manipulate vector data through two worked examples:

1. Hello, world!

2. Animal oceanographers

We will also play with raster data with a further two examples:

1. Introduction to raster data

2. Working with real world data

Accompanying slides can be downloaded from here

1.1 Set up your working environment

1. Create a new project within Rstudio. If you are unsure, instructions on how to do this can be found here.

2. Download the Data.

3. Unzip and store its contents in a folder named data within your new project.

4. Now create the following folders within your project - output & img. This can be done from within R as follows:

dir.create("output")
dir.create("img")

5. Run the following code to install all required packages:

install.packages(c("rgdal",
                 "raster",
                 "viridis",
                 "leaflet",
                 "ggplot2",
                 "mapproj",
                 "robis",
                 "gifski",
                 "elevatr",
                 "move",
                 "moveVis",
                 "dplyr",
                 "lubridate",
                 "rgeos",
                 "adehabitatHR",
                 "RColorBrewer",
                 "rasterVis",
                 "rgl"))

5. Once your working environment is set up, you can copy/paste the lines of code from this website into R script(s) to run.