[R-sig-Geo] ongoing spatial developments in R

[Michael Sumner]

Hello,

this is just a note to share some links about new developments in the R
spatial ecosystems.

1) Simple features for R

The main thing going on is the new "simple features for R" package, which
is still in development, but is now on CRAN:

http://r-spatial.org/r/2016/11/02/sfcran.html

("Simple features" is about the "vector stuff", shapefiles and the like,
i.e.  points, lines, and polygons - not the gridded raster/image stuff.)

The best place for an intro is Edzer's blog post/s above, and the vignettes
that are included with the package - and I mean it, if you are interested
in spatial in R you should read these, it is excellent material. You will
be pleasantly surprised by what is possible and how well things are
explained and the ease of use and overall consistency.

Please note that "sf" and its kin is not yet a total replacement for the
sp/rgdal/raster family so those packages will continue to be important for
some time, and it may be that the new stuff is not relevant to you. This is
an area of active development, which is not to everyone's tastes and needs
so use your own discretion of course.

There are important opportunities leveraging the simple features support,
and the biggest ones are the packages "leaflet", "ggplot2", and "mapview".
These are all on CRAN and have open development repositories where you can
see what is going on and what is in the pipeline. There will be much
greater flexibility and efficiency for spatial tasks in R, and there will
be powerful tools for interactivity and new ways of thinking about and
working with spatial data.

2) Future directions and discussion

There is a general "future directions and discussion" repository on GitHub,
set up by Tim Appelhans (an author of mapview). Check out the material
there and the discussions in the "Issues" tab, get involved.

https://github.com/tim-salabim/rspatial

I have written a pretty loose and opinionated summary here, not all of it
is accurate partly due to ongoing improvements in various packages. I've
had to edit this document to keep it accurate in the last few days, having
written the first draft 10 days ago. (Some of it is probably just wrong and
some is speculative and dreamy)

http://mdsumner.github.io/2017/01/10/spatial-r-2017.html

3) LiDAR!

CRAN now has LAS and LiDAR manipulation support in two integrated packages.
  I love this, it's been a huge hole for a long time and having this now is
very timely for future directions.

https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lidR
https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rlas

4) Community

Finally, please explore the new stuff, get involved, share your ideas and
tell this list and the world what you want and what you've tried. All the
developing projects will welcome reproducible tests and bug reports and
contributions, though do check them individually for a code of conduct and
how-tos for getting involved.

There are also other active community discussion on twitter, see the
#rstats tag there.

All the best.

Michael Sumner


-- 
Dr. Michael Sumner
Software and Database Engineer
Australian Antarctic Division
203 Channel Highway
Kingston Tasmania 7050 Australia

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