quantarcticR

Quantarctica is a collection of Antarctic geographical datasets which works with the free, cross-platform, open-source software QGIS. It includes community-contributed, peer-reviewed data from ten different scientific themes and a professionally-designed basemap.

The quantarcticR package provides access to Quantarctica data sets for R users, without needing QGIS to be installed. R users can use these data sets with e.g. the raster, sp, or sf packages.

Installation

You can install the development version of quantarcticR from GitHub with:

remotes::install_github("SCAR/quantarcticR")

Example

library(quantarcticR)

quantarcticR will download data from whichever Quantarctica mirror has been selected. The USA mirror is chosen by default, but you can change this: see help("qa_mirror").

List all available datasets:

ds <- qa_datasets()
head(ds)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 5
#>   layername                           main_file       type  cached download_size
#>   <chr>                               <chr>           <chr> <lgl>    <fs::bytes>
#> 1 Overview place names                /tmp/RtmpL644S… shap… FALSE         19.74K
#> 2 COMNAP listed facilities            /tmp/RtmpL644S… shap… FALSE        691.92K
#> 3 Subantarctic stations               /tmp/RtmpL644S… shap… FALSE        691.92K
#> 4 SCAR Composite gazetteer            /tmp/RtmpL644S… shap… FALSE        329.05M
#> 5 IBO-IOC GEBCO Features (point)      /tmp/RtmpL644S… shap… FALSE          1.25M
#> 6 IBO-IOC GEBCO Features (multipoint) /tmp/RtmpL644S… shap… FALSE          1.25M

Fetch one and plot it:

res <- qa_get("ADD Simple basemap", verbose = TRUE)
#> 
#> Fri Mar  8 13:43:49 2024
#> Synchronizing dataset: ADD Simple basemap
#> Source URL https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/
#> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#> 
#>  this dataset path is: /tmp/RtmpL644SK/quantarcticR-cache/Miscellaneous//SimpleBasemap
#>  visiting https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ ... done.
#>  downloading file 1 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.cpg ...  done.
#>  downloading file 2 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.dbf ...  done.
#>  downloading file 3 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.prj ...  done.
#>  downloading file 4 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.qix ...  done.
#>  downloading file 5 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.qmd ...  done.
#>  downloading file 6 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.qml ...  done.
#>  downloading file 7 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.shp ...  done.
#>  downloading file 8 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.shx ...  done.
#>  downloading file 9 of 9: https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/gis/quantarctica/Quantarctica3/Miscellaneous/SimpleBasemap/ADD_DerivedLowresBasemap.txt ...  done.
#> 
#> Fri Mar  8 13:43:57 2024 dataset synchronization complete: ADD Simple basemap

library(raster)
plot(res)

See the introductory vignette for more information.

See also

• qgisprocess

• RQGIS ARCHIVED: provides an R-QGIS interface, via Python middleware.