11/03/2019 Geocomputation with R

Geocomputation with R
Robin Lovelace, Jakub Nowosad, Jannes Muenchow

2019-03-10

Welcome
This is the online home of Geocomputation with R, a book on geographic data analysis,
visualization and modeling.

Note: This book has now been published by CRC Press in the R Series. You can buy the book
from CRC Press, Wordery, or Amazon.

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Inspired by bookdown and the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G)
movement, this book is open source. This ensures its contents are reproducible and publicly
accessible for people worldwide.

The online version of the book is hosted at geocompr.robinlovelace.net and kept up-to-date by
Travis, which provides information on its ‘build status’ as follows:

build passing

The version of the book you are reading now was built on 2019-03-10 and was built on Travis.

How to contribute?

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11/03/2019 Geocomputation with R

bookdown makes editing a book as easy as editing a wiki, provided you have a GitHub
account (sign-up at github.com). Once logged-in to GitHub, click on the ‘edit me’ icon
highlighted with a red ellipse in the image below. This will take you to an editable version of
the the source R Markdown file that generated the page you’re on:

To raise an issue about the book’s content (e.g. code not running) or make a feature request,
check-out the issue tracker.

Reproducibility

To reproduce the code in the book, you need a recent version of R and up-to-date packages.
These can be installed with the following command (which requires devtools):

devtools::install_github("geocompr/geocompkg")

To build the book locally, clone or download the geocompr repo, load R in root directory
(e.g. by opening geocompr.Rproj in RStudio) and run the following lines:

bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd") # to build the book

browseURL("_book/index.html") # to view it

Supporting the project

If you find the book useful, please support it by:

Recommending, citing or linking-to it

‘Starring’ the geocompr GitHub repository
Reviewing it, e.g. on Amazon or Goodreads
Buying a copy

Further details can be found at github.com/Robinlovelace/geocompr.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

4.0 International License.

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11/03/2019 Preface | Geocomputation with R

Preface

Who this book is for

This book is for people who want to analyze, visualize and model geographic data with open
source software. It is based on R, a statistical programming language that has powerful data
processing, visualization and geospatial capabilities. The book covers a wide range of topics
and will be of interest to a wide range of people from many different backgrounds, especially:

People who have learned spatial analysis skills using a desktop Geographic Information
System (GIS) such as QGIS, ArcMap, GRASS or SAGA, who want access to a powerful
(geo)statistical and visualization programming language and the benefits of a command-
line approach (Sherman 2008):

With the advent of ‘modern’ GIS software, most people want to point and click their way
through life. That’s good, but there is a tremendous amount of flexibility and power
waiting for you with the command line.

Graduate students and researchers from fields specializing in geographic data including
Geography, Remote Sensing, Planning, GIS and Geographic Data Science
Academics and post-graduate students working on projects in fields including Geology,
Regional Science, Biology and Ecology, Agricultural Sciences (precision farming),
Archaeology, Epidemiology, Transport Modeling, and broadly defined Data Science which
require the power and flexibility of R for their research
Applied researchers and analysts in public, private or third-sector organizations who need
the reproducibility, speed and flexibility of a command-line language such as R in
applications dealing with spatial data as diverse as Urban and Transport Planning,
Logistics, Geo-marketing (store location analysis) and Emergency Planning

The book is designed for intermediate-to-advanced R users interested in geocomputation and

R beginners who have prior experience with geographic data. If you are new to both R and
geographic data, do not be discouraged: we provide links to further materials and describe the
nature of spatial data from a beginner’s perspective in Chapter 2 and in links provided below.

How to read this book

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The book is divided into three parts:

1. Part I: Foundations, aimed at getting you up-to-speed with geographic data in R.

2. Part II: Extensions, which covers advanced techniques.
3. Part III: Applications, to real-world problems.

The chapters get progressively harder in each so we recommend reading the book in order. A
major barrier to geographical analysis in R is its steep learning curve. The chapters in Part I
aim to address this by providing reproducible code on simple datasets that should ease the
process of getting started.

An important aspect of the book from a teaching/learning perspective is the exercises at the
end of each chapter. Completing these will develop your skills and equip you with the
confidence needed to tackle a range of geospatial problems. Solutions to the exercises, and a
number of extended examples, are provided on the book’s supporting website, at
geocompr.github.io.

Impatient readers are welcome to dive straight into the practical examples, starting in Chapter
2. However, we recommend reading about the wider context of Geocomputation with R in
Chapter 1 first. If you are new to R, we also recommend learning more about the language
before attempting to run the code chunks provided in each chapter (unless you’re reading the
book for an understanding of the concepts). Fortunately for R beginners R has a supportive
community that has developed a wealth of resources that can help. We particularly
recommend three tutorials: R for Data Science (Grolemund and Wickham 2016) and Efficient
R Programming (Gillespie and Lovelace 2016), especially Chapter 2 (on installing and setting-
up R/RStudio) and Chapter 10 (on learning to learn), and An introduction to R (Venables,
Smith, and Team 2017). A good interactive tutorial is DataCamp’s Introduction to R.

Why R?

Although R has a steep learning curve, the command-line approach advocated in this book
can quickly pay off. As you’ll learn in subsequent chapters, R is an effective tool for tackling a
wide range of geographic data challenges. We expect that, with practice, R will become the
program of choice in your geospatial toolbox for many applications. Typing and executing
commands at the command-line is, in many cases, faster than pointing-and-clicking around
the graphical user interface (GUI) a desktop GIS. For some applications such as Spatial
Statistics and modeling R may be the only realistic way to get the work done.

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As outlined in Section 1.2, there are many reasons for using R for geocomputation: R is well-
suited to the interactive use required in many geographic data analysis workflows compared
with other languages. R excels in the rapidly growing fields of Data Science (which includes
data carpentry, statistical learning techniques and data visualization) and Big Data (via
efficient interfaces to databases and distributed computing systems). Furthermore R enables a
reproducible workflow: sharing scripts underlying your analysis will allow others to build-on
your work. To ensure reproducibility in this book we have made its source code available at
github.com/Robinlovelace/geocompr. There you will find script files in the  code/  folder that
generate figures: when code generating a figure is not provided in the main text of the book,
the name of the script file that generated it is provided in the caption (see for example the
caption for Figure 12.2).

Other languages such as Python, Java and C++ can be used for geocomputation and there
are excellent resources for learning geocomputation without R, as discussed in Section 1.3.
None of these provide the unique combination of package ecosystem, statistical capabilities,
visualization options, powerful IDEs offered by the R community. Furthermore, by teaching
how to use one language (R) in depth, this book will equip you with the concepts and
confidence needed to do geocomputation in other languages.

Real-world impact

Geocomputation with R will equip you with knowledge and skills to tackle a wide range of
issues, including those with scientific, societal and environmental implications, manifested in
geographic data. As described in Section 1.1, geocomputation is not only about using
computers to process geographic data: it is also about real-world impact. If you are interested
in the wider context and motivations behind this book, read on; these are covered in Chapter
1.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to everyone who contributed directly and indirectly via the code hosting and
collaboration site GitHub, including the following people who contributed direct via pull
requests: katygregg, erstearns, eyesofbambi, tyluRp, marcosci, giocomai, mdsumner,
rsbivand, pat-s, gisma, ateucher, annakrystalli, gavinsimpson, Henrik-P, Himanshuteli,
yutannihilation, jbixon13, katiejolly, layik, mvl22, nickbearman, ganes1410, richfitz,
SymbolixAU, wdearden, yihui, chihinl. Special thanks to Marco Sciaini, who not only created

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the front cover image, but also published the code that generated it (see  frontcover.R  in
the book’s GitHub repo). Dozens more people contributed online, by raising and commenting
on issues, and by providing feedback via social media. The  #geocompr  hashtag will live on!

We would like to thank John Kimmel from CRC Press, who has worked with us over two years
to take our ideas from an early book plan into production via four rounds of peer review. The
reviewers deserve special mention here: their detailed feedback and expertise substantially
improved the book’s structure and content.

We thank Patrick Schratz and Alexander Brenning from the University of Jena for fruitful
discussions on and input into Chapters 11 and 14. We thank Emmanuel Blondel from the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for expert input into the section on web
services; Michael Sumner for critical input into many areas of the book, especially the
discussion of algorithms in Chapter 10; Tim Appelhans and David Cooley for key contributions
to the visualization chapter (Chapter 8); and Katy Gregg, who proofread every chapter and
greatly improved the readability of the book.

Countless others could be mentioned who contributed in myriad ways. The final thank you is
for all the software developers who make geocomputation with R possible. Edzer Pebesma
(who created the sf package), Robert Hijmans (who created raster) and Roger Bivand (who
laid the foundations for much R-spatial software) have made high performance geographic
computing possible in R.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

4.0 International License.

References

Gillespie, Colin, and Robin Lovelace. 2016. Efficient R Programming: A Practical Guide to
Smarter Programming. O’Reilly Media.

Grolemund, Garrett, and Hadley Wickham. 2016. R for Data Science. O’Reilly Media.

Sherman, Gary. 2008. Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools. Pragmatic
Bookshelf.

Venables, W.N., D.M. Smith, and R Core Team. 2017. An Introduction to R. Notes on R: A
Programming Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics.

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