Areal Data: Coordinates and Geometries

Content for Monday, September 11, 2023

Now that you have a bit of the fundamentals of geographic data and have had a chance to start using R, it’s time to get into more complicated workflows. To do that, you’ll have to have a bit more of a foundation in coordinates, coordinate reference systems, and geometries and how to access those in R. We’ll start there today and move into functions that change or relate geometries in the next few classes.

Readings

Objectives

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

  • Define coordinate, coordinate system, datum, and coordinate reference system

  • Access coordinate and geometry information for simple features in R

  • Understand the rules for simple feature geometries

  • Access and transform the coordinate reference system for vector and raster data in R

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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Link to Panopto Recording

References

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