r-spatial/sf

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1442 stars · 302 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

sf is an R package providing Simple Features access for vector geospatial data, representing geometries as list-columns in data frames. It interfaces with GEOS, GDAL, and PROJ for geometric operations, file/database I/O, and coordinate reference system transformations.

Use cases

• read and write shapefiles and geospatial formats in R
• perform spatial joins and geometric operations on vector data
• reproject coordinates between coordinate reference systems
• work with PostGIS spatial databases from R
• analyze and plot spatial polygons and points in data frames
• convert between WKB/WKT and R spatial objects

When to choose

• you need vector (simple features) spatial data handling in R with tidyverse-style data frames
• you want a modern replacement for the sp package with GDAL/GEOS/PROJ bindings
• you need fast I/O to many geospatial file formats or spatial databases

When to avoid

• you primarily work with raster data or data cubes (use the stars package instead)
• you need geospatial capabilities outside the R ecosystem
• you need network analysis on spatial graphs (consider sfnetworks)

Facets

library · maturity stable

geospatial parser serialization data-science data-science cross-platform windows r-package simple-features gdal geos proj postgis vector-data coordinate-reference-systems geospatial maps r linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="r-spatial/sf")