Writing ArcGIS Shapefiles from R; advice?
Dear List, Firstly, a confession: I'm not a GIS expert and I have next to no experience of using ArcGIS or shapefiles. Apologies if anything I write below is stupid! I have an ESRI ASCII grid file that I have read into R and successfully (with the help of this list) processed it into a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object (via SpatialPixelsDataFrame). I have unionised the polygons to a set of depth intervals, so all the individual polygons associated with depths (say) between 1 and 2 m are given the same ID; there are several depth intervals, therefore several IDs. This is fine, and I'm happy with this, but I need to export this object to ESRI Shapefile(s). I have exported the whole SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object to a single shapefile but when my colleagues open this in ArcGIS, there is a single layer for all depth levels and they'd like to be able to have a layer per polygon ID. Is this possible, to write out the SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object such that ArcGIS knows that each polygon ID is a separate layer? I have worked out how to break apart the SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object into the equivalent but with a single ID (depth interval), and have written those out into separate shapefiles, one per depth interval, which when loaded into ArcGIS are represented by separate layers, but dealing with more than a few shapefiles at once is proving "difficult" (!??!) for some, hence if it were possible to produce a single shapefile with separate "layers" that might solve that particular issue. Second Q is; is there a way to include information about how ArcGIS displays each layer/shapefile? For example, we'd like to give each layer/shapefile a particular fill colour, so that when loaded by a user into ArcGIS, the particular depth polygons have a nice gradient representing depth. Is this even remotely possible from within R, or is this something ArcGIS does and is separate from the shapefile per se? Currently I am using writeOGR to read out these objects to ESRI shapefiles. The reason I ask these questions is because we have a lot of these lake bathymetries and dealing with them in ArcGIS (to get separate layers and colour those layers accordingly) by hand is a non starter and we don't want to start writing VB scripts in Arc at this stage. Thanks in advance for any pointers or suggestions you may have. And apologies again for showing my ignorance as regards shapefiles. All the best, Gavin
%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% Dr. Gavin Simpson [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522 ECRC, UCL Geography, [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565 Pearson Building, [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk Gower Street, London [w] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/ UK. WC1E 6BT. [w] http://www.freshwaters.org.uk %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%