Clipping spatial data in R

Tutorial on clipping spatial data in R

This post shows how to clip spatial data in R using different methods.

Key methods covered

1. Bounding box clipping - Using gClip() function
2. Polygon clipping - Using sf/raster packages
3. Spatial subsetting - Extracting data within a region

R has mature and fairly fast functions for spatial overlays and clipping. The sf package has made this even easier in recent years.

This was originally part of the “Creating maps in R” tutorial series.