area
Size of cells
Raster objects: Compute the approximate surface area of cells in an unprojected (longitude/latitude) Raster object. It is an approximation because area is computed as the height (latitudinal span) of a cell (which is constant among all cells) times the width (longitudinal span) in the (latitudinal) middle of a cell. The width is smaller at the poleward side than at the equator-ward side of a cell. This variation is greatest near the poles and the values are thus not very precise for very high latitudes.
SpatialPolygons: Compute the area of the spatial features. Works for both planar and angular (lon/lat) coordinate reference systems
Usage
# S4 method for RasterLayer
area(x, filename="", na.rm=FALSE, weights=FALSE, ...)# S4 method for RasterStackBrick
area(x, filename="", na.rm=FALSE, weights=FALSE, ...)
# S4 method for SpatialPolygons
area(x, ...)
Arguments
- x
Raster* or SpatialPolygons object
- filename
character. Filename for the output Raster object (optional)
- na.rm
logical. If
TRUE, cells that areNAare ignored- weights
logical. If
TRUE, the area of each cells is divided by the total area of all cells that are notNA- ...
additional arguments as for
writeRaster
Details
If x is a RasterStack/Brick, a RasterBrick will be returned if na.rm=TRUE. However, if na.rm=FALSE, a RasterLayer is returned, because the values would be the same for all layers.
Value
If x is a Raster* object: RasterLayer or RasterBrick. Cell values represent the size of the cell in km2, or the relative size if weights=TRUE
If x is a SpatialPolygons* object: area if each spatial object in squared meters if the CRS is longitude/latitude, or in squared map units (typically meter)
Examples
# NOT RUN {
r <- raster(nrow=18, ncol=36)
a <- area(r)
if (require(rgdal) & require(rgeos)) {
p <- shapefile(system.file("external/lux.shp", package="raster"))
p$area <- round(area(p) / 10000000,1)
p$area
}
# }