elevatrSeveral major changes have been made to elevatr in
response to the retirement of legacy spatial packages (see https://r-spatial.org/r/2023/05/15/evolution4.html for
details). Version 0.99.0 has switched to using sf and
terra for all data handling; however, in this version a
raster RasterLayer is still returned from
get_elev_raster(). Additional changes are planned for
version 1+, most notably the return for get_elev_raster()
will be a terra SpatRaster. Please plan accordingly for
your analyses and/or packages account for this change.
An R package for accessing elevation data from various sources
The elevatr package currently provides access to
elevation data from AWS Open Data Terrain Tiles
and the Open Topography Global datasets API
for raster digital elevation models. For point elevation data,the USGS Elevation Point Query
Service) may be used or the point elevations may be derived from the
AWS Tiles. Additional elevation data sources may be added as they come
available.
Currently this package includes just two primary functions to access elevation web services:
get_elev_point(): Get point elevations using the USGS
Elevation Point Query Service (for the US Only) or using the AWS Terrain
Tiles (global). This will accept a data frame of x (long) and y (lat), a
Simple Features object, or terra SpatRaster as input. A
Simple Features object is returned of the point locations and
elevations.get_elev_raster(): Get elevation data as a raster
(e.g. a Digital Elevation Model) from the AWS Open Data Terrain Tiles or
Open Topography Global datasets. Other sources may be added later. This
will accept a data frame of of x (long) and y (lat) or any
sf or terra SpatRaster object as input and
will return a terra SpatRaster object of the elevation. The
extent of the SpatRaster is the full tiles that cover the bounding box
of the input spatial data, but may be clipped to the shape or bounding
box of the input locations.Version 0.99.0 of this package is currently available from CRAN and may be installed by:
install.packages("elevatr")The development version (this repo) may installed with
devtools:
library(devtools)
install_github("jhollist/elevatr")As elevatr is getting more widely used, there have been
some great contributions, use cases, and additional packages that have
come from the user community. If you have one you’d like to share, let
me know and I will gladly add it. Here are some of the ones that I have
seen. Thank you all!
rayshader and elevatr
cheatsheetrayvista package uses rayshader,
maptiles, and elevatr to create some cool
visualizationsMapzen terrain tiles (which supply the AWS source) contain 3DEP, SRTM, and GMTED2010 content courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey and ETOPO1 content courtesy of U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Open Topography API provide access to the SRTM and the ALOS World 3D datasets. See https://opentopography.org/ for details.
The source code for this repository is maintained at https://github.com/jhollist/elevatr which is also mirrored at https://github.com/usepa/elevatr
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