A geographic information system (GIS) is the go-to technology that allows us to visualize, question, analyze, and interpret geospatial data to understand relationships, patterns, and trends in order to make better decisions about location such as real estate site selection, route selection, evacuation planning, natural resource extraction, and many more. With the recent growth of location-aware devices, it's increasingly easy to add spatial information to other data based on the address and related information.
In this chapter, we will cover recipes to perform some common operations with geospatial data using R packages such as sp, rgdal, RgoogleMaps, and ggmap along with a popular open source software--QGIS.