terra

This R package is a replacement of the raster package. It has a very similar, but simpler, interface, and it is much faster.

All native computations are done in C++. Classes, methods and properties are exposed via a Rcpp module. The R side has two main S4 classes (SpatRaster and SpatVector) that represent spatial data. These classes have only slot, a reference to a C++ object. They are used to provide a "normal" "S4" R user-interface as in the raster package.

The first (alpha) release is expected by July 2019.

Installation

You need to have the current version of raster from CRAN (>= 2.9-22) or install the development version of "raster".

Windows

If you are on Windows, you need to first install Rtools to get a C++ compiler that R can use. After that, you need the first install development version of "raster" for "terra" to work.

Then, in R, install the packages.

library(devtools)
install.packages("raster")
#devtools::install_github("rspatial/raster")
devtools::install_github("rspatial/terra")

Mac - OSX

The libraries GDAL (>= 2.0.0), GEOS (>= 3.3.0) and Proj.4 (>= 4.8.0) are required (as for sf)

With Homebrew you can do:

brew install gdal

And now, in R, install the packages.

library(devtools)
install.packages("raster")
#devtools::install_github("rspatial/raster")
devtools::install_github("rspatial/terra")

Linux

The libraries GDAL (>= 2.0.0), GEOS (>= 3.3.0) and Proj.4 (>= 4.8.0) are required (as for sf)

To install these on Ubuntu you can do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev 

And now, in R, install the packages.

library(devtools)
install.packages("raster")
#devtools::install_github("rspatial/raster")
devtools::install_github("rspatial/terra")

See the sf instructions for installation on other linux systems.