r-spatial is a new blog.

R has been used for the analysis of spatial data since the early days of R. Initiated by Roger Bivand, structured community efforts started in 2003 at a dedicated pre-conference workshop during DSC2003. Soon afterwards, the r-sig-geo mailing list was created, which in 2016 has 3400 subscribers.

The mailing list works mostly in a question-answer mode. More recently, many questions have also appeared on stackoverflow (for instance under the tags sp, r-raster, spatial), which not only gamifies but also arguably allows for incremental improvement of the question, code block layout and illustration by output graphs.

A lot of peer reviewed material on R software for spatial analysis has appeared in peer reviewed journals, including the Journal of Statistical Software (with issue 63 entirely dedicated to spatial statistics) and The R Journal.

This blog is meant to serve a middle road or an alternative to the above outlets. I hope it will collect a comments, opinions, tutorials, and discussion pieces from the those inclined to contribute, and that it will collect contributions that are valuable to this community. Contributions can be sent to me by email (in plain text, markdown, or R-markdown), or as pull request to github. Posts containing code segments and table or figure output need to come with data and be 100% reproducible.