Spatial data is special data

Today we’ll start getting into the nitty-gritty of geographic data and how the various elements describing spatial position are managed within R.

Objectives

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

• Describe several ways to load spatial data into R

• Define a coordinate reference system and describe why it is important

• Identify the different ways projections are expressed in R and gdal

• Describe the other key elements of spatial data

Readings

• Coordinate Reference Systems Section 2.4 in Lovelace et al., Geocomputation with R (Lovelace et al. 2019)

• Chapter 1: Introduction in Essentials of Geographic Information Systems by Campbell and Shin (Campbell and Shin 2011)

• Scale and Projections - a portion of Mapping, Society, and Technology an Laura Matson and Melinda Kernik.

Slides

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• Welcome
• Defining location
• The CRS
• Other important elements