Areal Data: Rasters

Content for Monday, September 18, 2023

Now that we’ve learned a bit about how to assess some of the important quantities of vector-based spatial data, we’ll try to apply a bit of the same logic to raster data. We’ll be using the terra package for the majority of raster options in this course primarily because it of its speed. That said, it is not a tidyverse package and so some of the intuition we used to organize the sf functions will be a little harder to extend here. I’ll do my best to help you make the links!!

Readings

  • Chapter 4 from Paula Moraga’s Spatial Statistics for Data Science: Theory and Practice with R provides a quick intro to using terra for raster and vector data.

  • The terra reference page provides a brief overview of all of the functions and their categories. We’ll only focus on the SpatRaster methods.

  • Raster Data Manipulation from the Spatial Data Science with R and terra ebook provides some nice examples of terra functions in the context of spatial workflows.

Objectives

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

  • Access the elements that define a raster

  • Build rasters from scratch using matrix operations and terra

  • Evaluate logical conditions with raster data

  • Calculate different measures of raster data

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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