Spatial Data as Vectors

Content for Monday, September 12, 2022

Readings

• The introductory vignette for the sf package has a lot of useful info on sf objects and conventions.

• Section 2.2 on Vector Data and Sections 5.1-5.3 on Geographic Operations in Lovelace et al. (Lovelace et al. 2019) - for more details about vectors and geometric operations on vectors.

• Section 3.1 and 3.2 of Spatial Data Science, a bookdown project by Edzer Pebesma and Roger Bivand (of the sf, sp, rgeos, and rgdal packages)

Objectives

By the end of today, you should be able to:

• Articulate the role of the data model in geographic information systems

• Describe the key elements of vector data

• Use the sf package to read and manipulate vector data

• Define geometry in the context of vector objects and troubleshoot common problems

Slides

The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

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Geography

Projections

Spatial Data in R

References

Lovelace, R., J. Nowosad, and J. Muenchow. 2019. Geocomputation with R. CRC Press.