Can R be used for GIS?

I'd like to create some GIS plots, and I'm wondering if R can be used for this. Here are some examples of plots I'd similar in concept to those I'd like to make:

A temperature plot (or contour plot) of the United States, with color (or height) determined by state GDP. Thus, state boundaries would give discontinuities in the resulting plot.
A temperature plot of the United States where altitude is used for data. In this case, the resulting plot should vary smoothly across state boundaries.
The sum of the above 2 plots (with some scaling applied).

I'm just starting to learn R, and want to know if it would be the right tool for this kind of job. Looking at the coord_map of ggplot2, it looks like superimposing data onto the US is possible. But getting data to respect state boundaries could be very difficult.

Any advice?

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it still at alpha stage but the Rgis (composed of R packages terrain, RemoteSensing, gdistance ..) project look very promising. You can test the package on r-forge. For raster data (DEM, altitude,...) handling there is the excellent raster package, and for other task like polygon clipping and more complicated stuff you can use rgeos (bidding of GEOS libs), maptools (for format exchange) or PBSmapping, and of course the sp package and the companion book Applied Spatial Analysis with R (Bivand, Pebsema and Rubio 2008) is a must.

On the other way, you can also link R to GIS like grass (spgrass6), saga (RSAGA), even QGIS and arcGIS but i don't use them.

finally you have to take a look at http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html

answered 2011-04-22T21:24:05.880

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