ABSTRACT
When data contain geographic coordinates, they can be considered a type of spatial data. The field of spatial statistics concerns building and interpreting models that include spatial coordinates. This chapter explores how to manage and visualize geospatial data in R. It helps the readers learn about how to work with shapefiles, which are a de facto open specification data structure for encoding spatial information. The chapter also helps the readers learn about projections (from three-dimensional space into two-dimensional space), colors (again), and how to create informative, and not misleading, spatially-aware visualizations. It provides the reader with the technical ability and intellectual know-how to derive meaning from geospatial data. Spatial data are often stored in special data structures. Every spatially-aware object in R can have a projection.
