Introduction to the practicals#

These practicals introduce a core set of GIS concepts and functions in R and then explore some more common use cases.

All of these practicals are self-paced: you can work through them at your own speed and call out when you need help.

Three before ‘me’#

There will be a team of demonstrators to help you when you get stuck but please do remember that helping yourself is actually a far better way to learn. We do not want you to struggle but before you reach out to a demonstrator:

  1. Ask yourself what you are trying to do: often stepping back and trying to write out an explanation for your problem helps you solve it.

  2. Ask the internet: Sites like stackoverflow.com are an invaluable resource and you can use tags on stackoverflow (e.g. [R] or [sf]) to narrow down your search.

  3. Ask each other: it can be really helpful to get together in a short Team meeting and crowd source an answer.

If none of those work then ask us!

Getting started#

  • Each practical has its own Posit Cloud assignment. This will contain all of the data needed for the practical and will have the required packages pre-installed.

  • If you are working on your own computer, you will need to install those packages and the data required in the practical. There are quite a lot of required packages - they could take a little while to set up. See here for details of the packages and data you will need.

  • Once you have your project launched or a local working directory set up and are running in R then create a new script file to record and run your code.

  • Work through the handouts at your own pace.

GIS packages#

There are loads of R packages that can load, manipulate and plot GIS data and we will be using several in these practical. In the last few years, the R spatial data community has been working on updating most of the core GIS functionality into a few core packages, notably sf and terra. We will focus on using these up-to-date central packages, but there will be some occasions where we need to use older packages, such as sp and raster.

Tasks#

Introducing tasks

A lot of these practicals will consist of following provided code to understand how it works but occasionally there will be tasks to test the skills you have been learning. These will start with a task bar like the one above and then have a description like this one. There will then always be a button marked ‘Click to show’: if you get really stuck, you can click on this to show a solution. Do try and figure it out for yourself and if you don’t understand something, ask a demonstrator to help.

Hey! No peeking