RSAGA-package: RSAGA: SAGA Geoprocessing and Terrain Analysis in R

Description

RSAGA provides direct access to SAGA GIS functions including, for example, a comprehensive set of terrain analysis algorithms for calculating local morphometric properties (slope, aspect, curvature), hydrographic characteristics (size, height, and aspect of catchment areas), and other process-related terrain attributes (potential incoming solar radiation, topographic wetness index, and more). In addition, (R)SAGA provides functions for importing and exporting different grid file formats, and tools for preprocessing grids, e.g. closing gaps or filling sinks.

Arguments

Details

RSAGA adds a framework for creating custom-defined focal functions, e.g. specialized filter and terrain attributes such as the topographic wind shelter index, within R. This framework can be used to apply predict methods of fitted statistical models to stacks of grids representing predictor variables. Furthermore, functions are provided for conveniently picking values at point locations from a grid using kriging or nearest neighbour interpolation.

RSAGA requires SAGA GIS (versions 2.0.4 - 2.2.3) are currently supported) and its user-contributed modules to be available on your computer. These can be downloaded under GPL from http://sourceforge.net/projects/saga-gis/. Please check the help page for rsaga.env to make sure that RSAGA can find your local installation of SAGA. You may need to 'tell' RSAGA where to find SAGA GIS.

Thanks to Olaf Conrad, Andre Ringeler and all the other SAGA GIS developers and contributors of this excellent geocomputing tool! Thanks to Rainer Hurling, Johan van de Wauw, Massimo Di Stefano and others for helping to adapt SAGA to and test it on unix and Max OSX.

References

Brenning, A., 2008. Statistical geocomputing combining R and SAGA: The example of landslide susceptibility analysis with generalized additive models. In J. Boehner, T. Blaschke and L. Montanarella (eds.), SAGA - Seconds Out (= Hamburger Beitraege zur Physischen Geographie und Landschaftsoekologie, vol. 19), p. 23-32.

Conrad, O., Bechtel, M., Bock, M., Dietrich, H., Fischer, E., Gerlitz, L., Wichmann, V., & Boehner, J. (2015). System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) v. 2.1.4. Geoscientific Model Development, 8, 1991-2007