Setting Up R and QGIS Environments for Geospatial Tasks

This chapter will walk its readers through the different stages of setting up the R and QGIS environments. R and QGIS are both free and open source software that can be used for various geospatial tasks. R benefits from more than 10,000 packages developed by its community, and QGIS also benefits from a number of plugins that are available to QGIS users. QGIS can complement R, and vice versa, for the conduct of many sophisticated geospatial tasks, and many statistical and machine learning algorithms can be very easily applied using R with the help of QGIS.

The first segment of the book starts by discussing how to install R and getting to know its environment. That is followed by data types in R, and different operations in R, and then getting acquainted with writing functions and plotting. The second segment consists of installing QGIS, learning the QGIS environment, and getting help in QGIS.

The following topics are to be covered in this chapter:

• Installing R
• Basic data types and the data structure in R
• Looping, functions, and apply family in R
• Plotting in R
• Installing QGIS
• Getting to know the QGIS environment.