In this chapter, we learned about the basics of GIS and learned particularly how vector data is stored in R and QGIS. We learned to import point data from an Excel file and how to plot it on a map in R. We used the ggmap package of R to accomplish this task along with various options for plotting these. The sp package of R has six main classes for dealing with spatial data: SpatialPoints, SpatialPointsDataFrame, SpatialLines, SpatialLinesDataFrame, SpatialPolygons, and SpatialPolygonsDataFrame. We learned to use the readOGR() function of the sp package for importing shapefiles containing different vector classes. In this chapter, we also learned to visualize quantitative and qualitative data in R.
We also learned how to use QGIS for vector data importation and how to visualize those. Importing Excel files to QGIS was also discussed, along with visualizing quantitative...