# Spatial data in R and remote sensing uncertainty - Earth analytics course module

Welcome to the first lesson in the Spatial data in R and remote sensing uncertainty module. This tutorial covers the basic principles of LiDAR remote sensing and the three commonly used data products: the digital elevation model, digital surface model and the canopy height model. Finally it walks through opening lidar derived raster data in R / RStudio

# Lesson 1. GIS in R: intro to vector format spatial data - points, lines and polygons

## Learning Objectives

After completing this tutorial, you will be able to:

• Describe the characteristics of 3 key vector data structures: points, lines and polygons.
• Open a shapefile in R using readOGR().
• View the metadata of a vector spatial layer in R including CRS
• Access the tabular (data.frame) attributes of a vector spatial layer in R.

## What you need

You will need a computer with internet access to complete this lesson and the data for week 5 of the course.

Vector data are composed of discrete geometric locations (x,y values) known as vertices that define the “shape” of the spatial object. The organization of the vertices, determines the type of vector that we are working with: point, line or polygon.

• Points: Each individual point is defined by a single x, y coordinate. There can be many points in a vector point file. Examples of point data include: sampling locations, the location of individual trees or the location of plots.
• Lines: Lines are composed of many (at least 2) vertices, or points, that are connected. For instance, a road or a stream may be represented by a line. This line is composed of a series of segments, each “bend” in the road or stream represents a vertex that has defined x, y location.
• Polygons: A polygon consists of 3 or more vertices that are connected and “closed”. Thus the outlines of plot boundaries, lakes, oceans, and states or countries are often represented by polygons. Occasionally, a polygon can have a hole in the middle of it (like a doughnut), this is something to be aware of but not an issue we will deal with in this tutorial.

Data Tip: Sometimes, boundary layers such as states and countries, are stored as lines rather than polygons. However, these boundaries, when represented as a line, will not create a closed object with a defined “area” that can be “filled”.

## Shapefiles: Points, Lines, and Polygons

Geospatial data in vector format are often stored in a shapefile format. Because the structure of points, lines, and polygons are different, each individual shapefile can only contain one vector type (all points, all lines or all polygons). You will not find a mixture of point, line and polygon objects in a single shapefile.

Objects stored in a shapefile often have a set of associated attributes that describe the data. For example, a line shapefile that contains the locations of streams, might contain the associated stream name, stream “order” and other information about each stream line object.

• More about shapefiles can found on Wikipedia.

## Import Shapefiles

We will use the rgdal package to work with vector data in R. Notice that the sp package automatically loads when rgdal is loaded. We will also load the raster package so we can explore raster and vector spatial metadata using similar commands.

# work with spatial data; sp package will load with rgdal.
library(rgdal)
library(rgeos)
# for metadata/attributes- vectors or rasters
library(raster)

# set working directory to earth-analytics dir
# setwd("pathToDirHere")


The shapefiles that we will import are:

• A polygon shapefile representing our field site boundary,
• A line shapefile representing roads, and
• A point shapefile representing the location of field siteslocated at the San Joachin field site.

The first shapefile that we will open contains the point locations where trees have been measured at the study site. The data are stored in shapefile format. To import shapefiles we use the R function readOGR().

readOGR() requires two components:

1. The directory where our shapefile lives: data/week_04/D17-California/SJER/vector_data/
2. The name of the shapefile (without the extension): SJER_plot_centroids

You can call each element separately

readOGR("path","fileName")

Or you can simply include the entire path to the shp file in the path argument. Both ways to open a shapefile are demonstrated below:

# Import a polygon shapefile: readOGR("path","fileName")

"SJER_plot_centroids")
## OGR data source with driver: ESRI Shapefile
## Source: "data/week_04/california/SJER/vector_data", layer: "SJER_plot_centroids"
## with 18 features
## It has 5 fields

# note the code below works too


Data Tip: The acronym, OGR, refers to the OpenGIS Simple Features Reference Implementation. Learn more about OGR.

When we import the SJER_plot_centroids shapefile layer into R the readOGR() function automatically stores information about the data. We are particularly interested in the geospatial metadata, describing the format, CRS, extent, and other components of the vector data, and the attributes which describe properties associated with each individual vector object.

Data Tip: The Shapefile Metadata & Attributes in R tutorial provides more information on both metadata and attributes and using attributes to subset and plot data.

Key metadata for all shapefiles include:

1. Object Type: the class of the imported object.
2. Coordinate Reference System (CRS): the projection of the data.
3. Extent: the spatial extent (geographic area that the shapefile covers) of the shapefile. Note that the spatial extent for a shapefile represents the extent for ALL spatial objects in the shapefile.

We can view shapefile metadata using the class, crs and extent methods:

# view just the class for the shapefile
class(sjer_plot_locations)
## [1] "SpatialPointsDataFrame"
## attr(,"package")
## [1] "sp"

# view just the crs for the shapefile
crs(sjer_plot_locations)
## CRS arguments:
##  +proj=utm +zone=11 +datum=WGS84 +units=m +no_defs +ellps=WGS84
## +towgs84=0,0,0

# view just the extent for the shapefile
extent(sjer_plot_locations)
## class       : Extent
## xmin        : 254739
## xmax        : 258497
## ymin        : 4107527
## ymax        : 4112168

# view all metadata at same time
sjer_plot_locations
## class       : SpatialPointsDataFrame
## features    : 18
## extent      : 254739, 258497, 4107527, 4112168  (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax)
## coord. ref. : +proj=utm +zone=11 +datum=WGS84 +units=m +no_defs +ellps=WGS84 +towgs84=0,0,0
## variables   : 5
## names       :  Plot_ID,  Point, northing, easting, plot_type
## min values  : SJER1068, center,  4107527,  254739,     grass
## max values  :  SJER952, center,  4112168,  258497,     trees


Our sjer_plot_locations object is a polygon of class SpatialPointsDataFrame, in the CRS UTM zone 18N. The CRS is critical to interpreting the object extent values as it specifies units.

## Spatial Data Attributes

Each object in a shapefile has one or more attributes associated with it. Shapefile attributes are similar to fields or columns in a spreadsheet. Each row in the spreadsheet has a set of columns associated with it that describe the row element. In the case of a shapefile, each row represents a spatial object - for example, a road, represented as a line in a line shapefile, will have one “row” of attributes associated with it. These attributes can include different types of information that describe objects stored within a shapefile. Thus, our road, may have a name, length, number of lanes, speed limit, type of road and other attributes stored with it.

We view the attributes of a SpatialPointsDataFrame using [email protected] (e.g., [email protected]).

# alternate way to view attributes
sjer_plot_locations@data
##     Plot_ID  Point northing easting plot_type
## 1  SJER1068 center  4111568  255852     trees
## 2   SJER112 center  4111299  257407     trees
## 3   SJER116 center  4110820  256839     grass
## 4   SJER117 center  4108752  256177     trees
## 5   SJER120 center  4110476  255968     grass
## 6   SJER128 center  4111389  257079     trees
## 7   SJER192 center  4111071  256683     grass
## 8   SJER272 center  4112168  256717     trees
## 9  SJER2796 center  4111534  256034      soil
## 10 SJER3239 center  4109857  258497      soil
## 11   SJER36 center  4110162  258278     trees
## 12  SJER361 center  4107527  256962     grass
## 13   SJER37 center  4107579  256148     trees
## 14    SJER4 center  4109767  257228     trees
## 15    SJER8 center  4110249  254739     trees
## 16  SJER824 center  4110048  256186      soil
## 17  SJER916 center  4109617  257460      soil
## 18  SJER952 center  4110759  255871     grass


In this case, our polygon object only has one attribute: id.

We can view a metadata & attribute summary of each shapefile by entering the name of the R object in the console. Note that the metadata output includes the class, the number of features, the extent, and the coordinate reference system (crs) of the R object. The last two lines of summary show a preview of the R object attributes.

# view a summary of metadata & attributes associated with the spatial object
summary(sjer_plot_locations)
## Object of class SpatialPointsDataFrame
## Coordinates:
##               min     max
## coords.x1  254739  258497
## coords.x2 4107527 4112168
## Is projected: TRUE
## proj4string :
## [+proj=utm +zone=11 +datum=WGS84 +units=m +no_defs +ellps=WGS84
## +towgs84=0,0,0]
## Number of points: 18
## Data attributes:
##    Plot_ID             Point              northing          easting
##  Length:18          Length:18          Min.   :4107527   Min.   :254739
##  Class :character   Class :character   1st Qu.:4109790   1st Qu.:256063
##  Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Median :4110363   Median :256700
##                                        Mean   :4110258   Mean   :256674
##                                        3rd Qu.:4111242   3rd Qu.:257191
##                                        Max.   :4112168   Max.   :258497
##   plot_type
##  Length:18
##  Class :character
##  Mode  :character
##
##
##


# Plot a Shapefile

Next, let’s visualize the data in our R spatialpointsdataframe object using plot().

# create a plot of the shapefile
# 'pch' sets the symbol
# 'col' sets point symbol color
plot(sjer_plot_locations, col = "blue",
pch=8,
main = "SJER Plot Locations\nMadera County, CA")


## Test your knowledge: Import Line & Polygon Shapefiles

Using the steps above, import the data/week_04/california/madera-county-roads/tl_2013_06039_roads and data/week_04/california/SJER/vector_data/SJER_crop.shp shapefiles into R. Call the roads object sjer_roads and the crop layer sjer_crop_extent.

1. What type of R spatial object is created when you import each layer?
2. What is the CRS and extent for each object?
3. Do the files contain, points, lines or polygons?
4. How many spatial objects are in each file?

## Plot Multiple Shapefiles

The plot() function can be used to plot spatial objects. Use the following arguments to add a title to your plot and to layer several spatial objects on top of each other in your plot.

• add = TRUE: overlay a shapefile or raster on top the existing plot. This argument mimics layers in a typical GIS application like QGIS.
• main = "": add a title to the plot. To add a line break to your title, use \n where the line break should occur.
# Plot multiple shapefiles
plot(sjer_crop_extent, col = "lightgreen",
main = "NEON Harvard Forest\nField Site")

# Use the pch element to adjust the symbology of the points
plot(sjer_plot_locations,
pch = 19,
col = "purple")


## Optional challenge: Import & plot roads shapefile

For more on parameter options in the base R plot() function, check out these resources: