FedData

One of the principal tasks of SKOPE is to develop tools to improve access to federated environmental data sources. To that end, we have begun developing FedData, a package for the R statistical environment implementing functions to automate downloading geospatial data available from several federated data sources (mainly sources maintained by the US Federal government).

Currently, the package enables extraction from seven datasets:

This package is designed with the large-scale geographic information system (GIS) use-case in mind: cases where the use of dynamic web-services is impractical due to the scale (spatial and/or temporal) of analysis. It functions primarily as a means of downloading tiled or otherwise spatially-defined datasets; additionally, it can preprocess those datasets by extracting data within an area of interest (AoI), defined spatially. It relies heavily on the **sp**, **raster**, and **rgdal** packages.

More information about FedData can be found here.