Spatial Data Fundamentals in R (UCANR-IGIS)

Overview

R has become a popular and powerful platform for working with geospatial data due to its well-developed ecosystem of packages to import, process, analyze and visualize spatial data, strong integration with visualization and statistical libraries, and large user community.

This workshop will cover the fundamentals of working with vector spatial data in R. Topics will include how R can complement desktop GIS, R packages for working with spatial data, importing vector spatial data from local and online sources, common spatial data manipulations including managing projections, basic visualization (i.e., mapping), working with attributes for querying and visualization, geoprocessing operations, spatial queries and joins. R packages used will include sf, arcgislayers, dplyr, and ggplot2. Best practices for using GenAI coding tools will also discussed. Raster data will not be covered.

The workshop format will combine short presentations with hands-on exercises using Quarto notebooks. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a collection of their own notebooks with working code recipes, and be better equipped to develop workflows and tackle new challenges.

Instructor

Andy Lyons, Program Coordinator, IGIS

Audience

UC Cooperative Extension
UC students & faculty
AIFS affiliates (including Davis, Berkeley, Cornell, U. Illinois, & USDA)

Cost

This is a free workshop

Requirements

Some experience with R. The workshop presumes basic functionality with R and RStudio (being rusty is ok because most of the examples will be "ready to run"). Participants with no GIS background are encouraged to watch a short video that reviews basic GIS concepts like projections, vector and raster data, attribute tables, etc. This workshop will also build upon the general data wrangling methods covered in the Data Wrangling workshop series (see the workshop description for the recordings).

Posit Cloud Account. This hands-on exercises (recommended but not required) will use RStudio running in a virtual machine from Posit Cloud (i.e., in a browser). Participants wishing to complete the hands-on exercises will therefore need a free account on Posit Cloud. Experienced R users are welcome to run the exercises in RStudio Desktop or Positron. A setup script will be provided, but support will be limited.

External monitor (recommended). Parts of the workshop will require you to follow along as the instructor demonstrates code to solve a problem. It is therefore highly recommended that you have a computer with two monitors, so you can view the instructor's screen on one monitor, and work in RStudio in the other. See here for tips on taking hands-on software workshops on Zoom.