In SCAR-sandpit/quantarcticR: Access to Quantarctica Data Sets

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  fig.path = "man/figures/README-",
  warning = FALSE,
  message = FALSE,
  out.width = "100%"
)
library(quantarcticR)
## for vignette purposes, and if this is Ben's computer, use a persistent cache_dir
if (grepl("ben_ray", qa_cache_dir())) qa_cache_dir("c:/data/Quantarctica3")

quantarcticR

Quantarctica is a collection of Antarctic geographical datasets which works with the free, cross-platform, open-source software QGIS. It includes community-contributed, peer-reviewed data from ten different scientific themes and a professionally-designed basemap.

The quantarcticR package provides access to Quantarctica data sets for R users, without needing QGIS to be installed. R users can use these data sets with e.g. the raster, sp, or sf packages.

Installation

You can install the development version of quantarcticR from GitHub with:

remotes::install_github("SCAR/quantarcticR")

Example

library(quantarcticR)

quantarcticR will download data from whichever Quantarctica mirror has been selected. The USA mirror is chosen by default, but you can change this: see help("qa_mirror").

List all available datasets:

ds <- qa_datasets()
head(ds)

Fetch one and plot it:

res <- qa_get("ADD Simple basemap", verbose = TRUE)

library(raster)
plot(res)

See the introductory vignette for more information.

See also

• qgisprocess

• RQGIS ARCHIVED: provides an R-QGIS interface, via Python middleware.

SCAR-sandpit/quantarcticR documentation built on June 10, 2025, 5:12 a.m.