Worksheet 4: Pattern-based spatial analysis

Exercises WS 4

1. Read the study area polygon from the exdata/harz_borders.gpkg file using the read_sf() function from the sf package.
2. Read the land cover raster data for Europe from the file exdata/lc_europe.tif using the function rast() from the package terra. Visualise both datasets.
3. Crop and mask the raster to the polygon boundaries. Visualise the results.
4. Compute a spatial signature for the study area. Can you understand its meaning?
5. Find out which areas of the Europe raster are most similar to the study area (this may take a minute or so). Try different window sizes (e.g. 200 or 500).

Addon

• Download Corine data from 2012 and 2018.
• Define an appropriate scale for the assessment of forest structure changes at European level
• Identify the areas with the smallest and largest changes
• Provide a short interpretation
• How’s the Harz ranked?