Context

The use of R for spatial analyses and geostatistical modelling could form the basis of a training course in itself (or several!). For the purposes of this training course, we have focused on importing spatial data, basic plotting sites on a coastline and visualisation of spatial trends.

Course participants that are interested are encouraged to learn additional skills for spatial analysis - as there are a number of benefits and applications for coral reef monitoring, including sampling design, removal of spatial autocorrelation, et cetera.

This wiki page provides some additional links for learning spatial analyses in R. We will endeavour to update this regularly as we encounter resources that may be useful to support the analysis and visualisation of coral reef monitoring data.

CRAN Task Views

The R CRAN Task view for the analysis of spatial data provides an overview of packages and R projects supporting spatial analyses, including raster, vector and spatial metadata.

Course participants are encouraged to review this task view and its complimentary Spatio Temporal view. As this Task view incorporates the temporal as well as the spatial component, there are many potential applications for analysing coral reef monitoring data.

Package vignettes

Don’t forget to have a look at the vignettes and help from individual packages for examples and applications. For example, the sf package contains a number of useful vignettes, blogs, presentations, cheatsheets and other materials that are strongly recommended.

E-books

There are a number of on-line books that cover topics of spatial data analysis. This one is particularly useful and contrasts the use of the raster and terra packages.

Another useful resource for learning spatial data analysis in R comes from Robin Lovelace and is highly recommended for the spatially adventurous.