Using Spatial Data with R

Claudia A Engel

Last updated: November 17, 2025

Prerequisites and Preparations

To get the most out of this workshop you should have:

• a basic knowledge of R and/or be familiar with the topics covered in the Introduction to R.
• have a recent version of R and RStudio installed.

Recommended:

1. Create a new RStudio project R-spatial in a new folder R-spatial.
   
2. Create a new folder under R-spatial and call it data.
   
3. Open up a new R Script file and call it R-spatial.R for the code you’ll create during the workshop.
4. Make sure your working directory is set to R-spatial and contains a folder called data.
   
5. Copy, paste, and run the following lines in R:

download.file("http://bit.ly/R-spatial-data", "R-spatial-data.zip")
unzip("R-spatial-data.zip", exdir = "data")

You can also download the data manually here R-spatial-data.zip and extract them in the data folder.

• Install and load the following libraries:
  • sf
  • terra
  • tidyverse
• For the mapping section install and load these additional libraries:
  • classInt
  • RColorBrewer
  • tmap
  • leaflet (optional)

References

Lovelace, R., Nowosad, J., Muenchow. J. (2024): Geocomputation with R

Pebesma, E. Bivand, R. (2023): Spatial Data Science

Gimond, M (2023): Intro to GIS and Spatial Analysis

Spatial Data Analysis and Modeling with R and terra

CRAN Task View: Analysis of Spatial Data

Acknowledgements

Some of the materials for this tutorial are adapted from http://datacarpentry.org