Rgshhs

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Read GSHHS polygons into SpatialPolygons object

Read GSHHS polygons into SpatialPolygons object for a chosen region, using binary shorelines from Global Self-consistant Hierarchical High-resolution Shorelines, release 1.5 of 3 April 2007 (ftp://ftp.soest.hawaii.edu/pwessel/gshhs/gshhs_1.5.zip). The data are provided in integer form as millionths of decimal degrees. Reading of earlier versions of the GSHHS binary files will fail with an error message. The netCDF GSHHS files distributed with GMT >= 4.2 cannot be read as they are in a very different format.

Keywords
spatial
Usage
Rgshhs(fn, xlim = NULL, ylim = NULL, level = 4, minarea = 0, shift=FALSE,
verbose = TRUE)
Arguments
fn
filename or full path to GSHHS 1.5 file to be read
xlim
longitude limits within 0-360 in most cases, negative longitudes are also found east of the Atlantic, but the Americas are recorded as positive values
ylim
latitude limits
level
maximum GSHHS level to include, defaults to 4 (everything), setting 1 will only retrieve land, no lakes
minarea
minimum area in square km to retrieve, default 0
shift
default FALSE, can be used to shift longitudes > 180 degrees to below zero, beware of artefacts involving unhandled polygon splitting at 180 degrees
verbose
default TRUE, print progress reports
Details

The package is distributed with the coarse version of the shoreline data, and much more detailed versions may be downloaded from the referenced websites. The data is of high quality, matching the accuracy of SRTM shorelines for the full dataset (but not for inland waterbodies). In general, users will construct study region SpatialPolygons objects, which can then be exported (for example as a shapefile), or used in other R packages (such as PBSmapping). The largest land polygons take considerable time to clip to the study region, certainly many minutes for an extract from the full resolution data file including Eurasia (with Africa) or the Americas. For this reason, do not give up if nothing seems to be happening after the (verbose) message: "Rgshhs: clipping of polygons ..." appears. Clipping the largest polygons in full resolution also needs a good deal of memory

Value

• a list with the following components:
• belongsa matrix showing which polygon belongs to (is included in) which polygon, going from the highest level among the selected polygons down to 1 (land); levels are: 1 land, 2 lake, 3 island_in_lake, 4 pond_in_island_in_lake.
• new_belongsa ragged list of polygon inclusion used for making SP
• SPa SpatialPolygons object; this is the principal output object, and will become the only output object as the package matures

Note

A number of steps are taken in this implementation that are unexpected, print messages, and so require explanation. Following the extraction of polygons intersecting the required region, a check is made to see if Antarctica is present. If it is, a new southern border is imposed at the southern ylim value or -90 if no ylim value is given. When clipping polygons seeming to intersect the required region boundary, it can happen that no polygon is left within the region (for example when the boundaries are overlaid, but also because the min/max polygon values in the header may not agree with the polygon itself (one case observed for a lake west of Groningen). The function then reports a null polygon. Another problem occurs when closed polygons are cut up during the finding of intersections between polygons and the required region boundary. The code in gpclib does not close them, so they are closed later, and the closure noted.

Please also note that limitations on the use of gpclib are very unclear, as exactly the same GPC code is included in the GPL'ed PBSmapping package on CRAN.

References

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/wessel/gshhs/gshhs.html, http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/shorelines/gshhs.html (only old format - use for information only); data downloaded from ftp://ftp.soest.hawaii.edu/pwessel/gshhs/gshhs_1.5.zip; Wessel, P., and W. H. F. Smith, A Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database, J. Geophys. Res., 101, 8741-8743, 1996.

• Rgshhs
Examples
gshhs.c.b <- system.file("share/gshhs_c.b", package="maptools")
NZx <- c(160,180)
NZy <- c(-50,-30)
NZ <- Rgshhs(gshhs.c.b, xlim=NZx, ylim=NZy)
plot(NZ$SP, col="khaki", pbg="azure2", xlim=NZx, ylim=NZy, xaxs="i", yaxs="i", axes=TRUE) GLx <- c(265,285) GLy <- c(40,50) GL <- Rgshhs(gshhs.c.b, xlim=GLx, ylim=GLy) plot(GL$SP, col="khaki", pbg="azure2", xlim=GLx, ylim=GLy, xaxs="i", yaxs="i", axes=TRUE)
Documentation reproduced from package maptools, version 0.7-3, License: GPL (>= 2)

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