Using the latest GDAL with R packages on macOS
UPDATE: see more recent version of this post here.
I wanted to play around with the new sf package, which requires the latest GDAL (>= 2.0.0), GEOS (>= 3.3.0), and PROJ.4 (>= 4.8.0).
However, the version of GDAL installed via brew is 1.11.4, so I needed to update to the latest version and reinstall a few R packages in order to get sf to work on macOS.
Update GDAL
## unlink the previous GDAL version
brew unlink gdal
## update GDAL to the latest version (2.1.2)
brew tap osgeo/osgeos4mac
brew install gdal2
brew link --force gdal2
(Re)install R spatial packages
Next, we need to install a few packages from source in order to use the new GDAL libraries:
## (re)install spatial packages from source
install.packages(c("rgeos", "sf", "sp"), type = "source")
## rgdal requires some additional configuration to build correctly:
## based on http://stackoverflow.com/a/26836125/1380598
install.packages("rgdal", type = "source",
configure.args = c("--with-proj-include=/usr/local/include",
"--with-proj-lib=/usr/local/lib"))
library(rgdal) ## confirm the GDAL version being used
Dr. Chubaty is an ecologist and simulation modeller who builds spatial models of forest landscapes and the species that live in them. He completed his PhD at Simon Fraser University modelling host selection in mountain pine beetle (MPB), followed by postdoctoral research at Université Laval and Natural Resources Canada developing forecasting models of MPB spread.
He runs FOR-CAST Research & Analytics in Calgary, Canada. His recent work
includes LANDIS-II forest landscape simulation studies, landscape
connectivity modelling, and analyses of insect outbreak dynamics, to inform
land management and species-at-risk decisions. He writes open-source R
packages for this work, including grainscape for connectivity analysis,
landisutils for LANDIS-II simulations, and co-developed the SpaDES
simulation platform. He advocates for open data and reproducible workflows.