In robitalec/distance-to: Calculate Distance to Features

distance-to

Overview

The distanceto package is designed to quickly sample distances from points features to other vector layers. Normally the approach for calculating distance to (something) involves generating distance surfaces using raster based approaches eg. raster::distance or gdal_proximity and subsequently point sampling these surfaces. Since raster based approaches are a costly method that frequently leads to memory issues or long and slow run times with high resolution data or large study sites, we have opted to compute these distances using vector based approaches. As a helper, there's a decidedly low-res raster based approach for visually inspecting your region's distance surface. But the workhorse is distance_to. See the Example.

Install

install.packages('distanceto', repos = 'https://robitalec.r-universe.dev')

Example

library(distanceto)
library(sf)

# Load nc data
nc <- st_read(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package="sf"))

# Set number of sampling points
npts <- 1e3

# Sample points in nc
ncpts <- st_sample(nc, npts)

# Select first 5 of nc
ncsub <- nc[1:5,]

# Measure distance from ncpts to first 5 of nc
dists <- distance_to(ncpts, ncsub, measure = 'geodesic')

head(dists, 30)

# Add to ncpts
ncpts$dist <- dists