I have released two new sp add-on packages on the r-spatial repository. Rgshhs converts GSHHS shorelines (as closed polygons) to sp class SpatialPolygons, which can then be written out as shapefiles for the chosen region. It's now very slow for full resolution, because clipping the largest land polygons takes a lot of time, but hopefully people don't do that every time they need data. It is provided with the coarse dataset, but works with the full and the others. It leaves the longitude coordinates in the -20 to 360 range like the data source. Details of the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database are avialable from: http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/wessel/gshhs/gshhs.html where the low, intermediate, high, and full resolution data may be downloaded from. I'd be grateful for ideas for making it faster, and am looking at providing indices of which level polygons are included in next-level polygons preprocessed in the package rather than computing them each time for chosen polygons. A second package is spspatstat, providing interfaces between some sp classes and the well-supported point pattern analysis package spatstat. The spatstat ppp and owin classes are matched with sp equivalents. To get a feel for where sp is going, (and after installing sp and spatstat from CRAN with their dependencies, and the new packages from http://r-spatial.sourceforge.net/R), try: library(Rgshhs) library(spspatstat) gshhs.c.b <- system.file("share/gshhs_c.b", package = "Rgshhs") NZx <- c(160, 180) NZy <- c(-50, -30) NZ <- Rgshhs(gshhs.c.b, xlim = NZx, ylim = NZy) plot(runifpoint(500, as(NZ$SP, "owin"))) Hoping for feedback, Roger
Roger Bivand Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43 e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no