Introduction

This is an introduction to spatial data manipulation with R and the terra package. In this context “spatial data” refers to data about geographical locations, that is, places on earth. So to be more precise, we should speak about “geospatial” data, but we use the shorthand “spatial”.

You can install the latest released version of terra from CRAN with install.packages("terra"). The development version is available from github, and see the instructions there for installation. The github is a good place to report what you believe to be bugs (errors in the software) or to request new features. You can ask questions on how to use terra on stackoverflow.

This is the introductory part of a set of resources for learning about spatial analysis and modeling with R. Here we cover the basics of data manipulation.

You need to know some of the basics of the R language before you can work with spatial data in R. If you have not worked with R before, or not recently, have a look at this brief introduction to R.