03 - Install spatial libraries

First we need to install several R libraries. R operates on user-contributed libraries, and we’ll be jumping into use of several of these spatial libraries in this workshop. Several libraries we’ll be making use of are sp, rgdal, rgeos, raster, and the new sf simple features library by Edzer Pebesma. You should be able to use the packages tab in RStudio (see below) to install binaries in a straightforward way. Mac and Linux users may have certain pre-requisites to fill, we’ll assume you can navigate these on your own or can assist as needed (one of us is using a Linux system).

Install all of the following packages in R:

install.packages("rgdal")
install.packages("rgeos")
install.packages("raster")
install.packages("sf")

Installing rgdal will install the foundation spatial package, sp, as a dependency.

For Linux users, to install simple features for R (sf), you need GDAL >= 2.0.0, GEOS >= 3.3.0, and Proj.4 >= 4.8.0. Edzer Pebesma’s Simple Features for R GitHub repo has a good explanation:

Simple Features for R

You basically want to add ubuntugis-unstable to the package repositories and then get those three dependencies:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get install libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev

The Simple features for R package , sf, also needs udunits and udunits2 which may need coercing in linux:

Units Issues in sf GitHub repo

The following should resolve:

sudo apt-get install libudunits2-dev