Converting From CSV to SHP in R.

From larva to adult. Photographs by Eric Gitonga

As I was going through a tutorial on doing geospatial data analysis in R, I came across a situation where I had collected my own data, and I needed to convert the CSV file into a SHP file. In this brief post, I share the solution I found.

First install the needed libraries if they are not yet on your system.

install.packages(c("tidyverse", "sf"))

Next, load the libraries.

library(tidyverse)

library(sf)

Now read in the CSV file into a dataframe.

geodata <- read_csv("data/geodata.csv")

Next, examine it to see what it looks like.

geodata

To convert the dataframe, use the Simple Features library

geodata_sf <- st_as_sf(geodata, coords = c("longitude", "latitude"), crs = 4326)

The arguments used are:

• geodata - the dataframe in question

• coords - the names of the columns with the latitude and longitude values

• crs - the coordinate reference system to be assigned to the output

Examine the data to see what it now looks like.

geodata_sf

The two columns latitude and longitude have been combined into a single geometry column that has points.

Finally, write this spatial dataframe to an R data object file.

write_rds(geodata_sf, "data/geodata.rds")

In future, we can now just read in this file as needed.

new_geodata <- read_rds("data/geodata.rds")

new_geodata

And that's how you convert a CSV file into a SHP file in R.

The code and data file are in my Code Snippets repo.