I know R is not meant to do all things a GIS would do but is there no simple
way to create a buffer around a spatial object?

I'd like to create a buffered minimum convex polygon around a set of points
and write the buffered polygon to a shapefile.  I have two columns, x and y,
for the geographic locations.  I can use convexhull.xy in spatstat to create
the MCP as an owin, then use dilate.owin to enlarge the window, but how can
I now convert the owin (or im) object into a SpatialPolygons object in order
to write it to a shapefile?  Most things seem possible when converting to
spatstat from sp objects but the other way around does not seem to hold....

The other option is potentially to use mcp in adehabitat, but then how do I
convert an area object into a Spatial object?  I want the SpatialPolygon in
shapefile format, not a dxf file of the areas....

Tyler

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