All things R Spatial

An introduction to spatial R for ArcGIS users

Nils Ratnaweera and Nikolaos Bakogiannis

Version from: 02 March, 2021

1 Welcome!

1.1 What this book is about

This is a resource for people wanting to learn spatial-R (Analysis, Visualization) in R and are coming with a background in ArcGIS. This resource should provide some help on this journey. To make use of this ressource, we assume two things: (1) that you have some prior experience with R and (2) that you have experience with Geodata and GIS-Concepts.

This book leans heavily on how the Toolboxes and Toolsets are organized in ArcGIS Pro. The idea is that you can look up specific things of which you only know the ArcGIS terminology for. This book is a work in progress, and we highly appreciate contributions to this book: If you have anything to add, please file an issue or make a pull request.

We are big fans of using magrittr’s pipe function %>% and heavily use it throughout this book. In addition for vector data, we use packages from the tidyverse (especially from the dplyr package: filter(), mutate() and summarise()).

1.2 How it started

We had long since thought about the necessity of a resource which helps ArcGIS users transition to R or Python. Nils had tweeted about this (see below) without getting much reception, and one point just decided to start his own resource. Since our research group teaches an introduction to GIS and an advanced GIS course mostly based on ArcGIS, we decided to pick up where Nils had started and develop the resource with internal funding of our University.

Figure 1.1: Nils’ Tweet might not have received much attention, but it did spark a conversation within our group