Introduction to GIS in R

Aims

• Know how to load spatial data into R using the sf library.
• Understand how spatial objects can be manipulated using dplyr.
• Understand how to use spatial joins.
• Be aware of map projections and Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS) and be able to modify them.
• Know how to make static and interactive maps in ggplot2.
• Be able to export your maps and shapefiles.

GIS and R

R is commonly used for statistical analysis and programming, however it also has a range of geospatial libraries developed by a community of researchers and programmers. In the last few years, working with spatial data became much easier in R, with the development of the sf package. sf keeps all the spatial information for each observation in a geometry column which means that we can treat it like a normal data frame and also perform spatial operations on the data.