[R-sig-Geo] Major update to gdalUtils now on R-Forge...

[Jonathan Greenberg]

R GIS'ers:

At long last, I've gotten around to getting gdalUtils updated (mostly) for
GDAL 2.0.  All available functions should now fully support GDAL 2.0.  I
have also added in wrappers for (most) of the new utilities added since
1.11.  I'll try to finish up the last of the wrappers ASAP, and push the
new package to CRAN, but for now, if anyone wants to play around with the
new version, please check out:

https://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=1695

install.packages("gdalUtils", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org")

A few exciting updates:

mosaic_rasters now works better and can support much larger mosaic inputs
(in theory, there should be no limitation on the number of input files you
can use with mosaic_raster).  I've also added a few helpful new parameters
such as "trim_margins" which allows you to pre-trim the margins of your
input tiles before they are mosaicked.  This can help with small NA edges
that are causing headaches with overlapping datasets.

align_rasters: my personal favorite new utility.  This allows for rapid
"syncing" of two rasters -- one raster is warped to match the CMS, extent,
and pixel size of another -- this is great for lining up datasets for map
algebra problems.  This is significantly faster than "spatial_sync_raster"
function in my other package, spatial.tools.  This also supports multi-core
processing, as well as a large number of warping options (anything
available in gdalwarp).  Drop this in a loop, and you can sync a large
number of rasters to a consistent extent.

I'm looking for some beta-testers to put the algorithms through the ringer,
so please let me know if you find any bugs.  I've tried to squash the bugs
that have been reported to me over the last few months.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this package, this provides
wrappers to the gdal raster (http://www.gdal.org/gdal_utilities.html) and
vector (http://www.gdal.org/ogr_utilities.html) command line utilities.
You MUST have gdal installed on your system before using the package.

Enjoy!

--j

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