coastlineWorld {oce} | R Documentation

## World coastline

### Description

World coastline, in coarse resolution and with country boundaries

### Usage

    data(coastlineWorld)

### Details

This is a coarse resolution coastline at scale 1:110M, with 10,696 points, suitable for world-scale plots plotted at a small size, e.g. inset diagrams. Finer resolution coastline files are provided in the ocedata package. The data set was created as follows.

1. Visit http://www.naturalearthdata.com and click the `downloads` tab. Three data sets are provided. Choose the coarse one, labelled “Small scale data, 1:110m.” For `coastlineWorld`, the link named “Cultural” was clicked, and this yields a new webpage. On this page, find the section named “Admin 0 - Countries” and select the link named “Download countries.” Now you will have a zip file on your machine.

2. Locate and expand the newly-downloaded zip file.

3. Run the following R code to read and save the coastline

             library(oce)
             coastlineWorld <- read.oce("ne_110m_admin_0_countries/ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shp")
             save(coastlineWorld, file="coastlineWorld.rda")
             library(tools)
             resaveRdaFiles("coastlineWorld.rda", compress="auto")

### Installing your own datasets

Follow the procedure along the lines described in “Details”, where of course your source file will differ. Also, you should change the name of the coastline object from `coastlineWorld`, to avoid conflicts with the built-in dataset. Save the `.rda` file to some directory of your choosing, e.g. perhaps `/data/coastlines` or `~/data/coastlines` on a unix-type machine. Then, whenever you need the file, use `load` to load it. Most users find it convenient to do the loading in an `Rprofile` startup file.

### Author(s)

Dan Kelley

### Source

Downloaded from http://www.naturalearthdata.com, in `ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shp`. This procedure worked in July 2015 and also in October 2015, so it is likely to be reasonably stable, but be aware that webpages do tend to change.

### See Also

The ocedata package provides two more coastlines with better resolution: `coastlineWorldMedium` and `coastlineWorldFine`.

The documentation for `coastline-class` explains the structure of `coastline` objects and discusses functions that deal with them.

The `maps` package provides a database named `world` that has 27221 points.

[Package oce version 0.9-18 Index]