Open Geospatial Data for Sustainability: Exploring and visualising with R

The book's target audience: For sustainable development practitioners seeking high-resolution global open datasets, this book gathers and presents selected geospatial data in an accessible format—including explanations and practical examples. It also serves as an entry point for remote sensing and GIS professionals who want to use R for geospatial analysis and visualisation. About the book: The book examines geospatial datasets covering infrastructure, biodiversity conservation, forests, mangroves, rivers and drainage basins, land cover and land use, fires, floods, droughts, and the delineation of administrative boundaries on land and at sea. It contains about 90 figures, including visualising datasets relevant to sustainable development, with illustrative examples from Southeast Asia. While Southeast Asia is the primary focus of the examples, the datasets are global in scope, and the book's guidance can be applied more broadly. Only datasets that are fully open in nature are presented. The author adopts the definition of open as given by the Open Knowledge Foundation, where "Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose." The open source RStudio application is used for coding in R. If the reader has not used RStudio before, the first chapter in the book provides a brief introduction, including its installation. The R code supplied in each chapter aims to assist the reader in downloading, processing, analysing and visualising spatial data, and could be used as a basis for further investigation. What the book covers: Discovering data: Where to locate contemporary, high-resolution geospatial datasets relevant to the book’s themes Practical tips: Guidance for downloading, processing and visualising geospatial data Regional examples: Applications of each dataset using case studies from Southeast Asia R code: Scripts for data retrieval, processing, analysis, and visualisation Book chapters: Coding in R with RStudio Boundaries Forests Rivers and Drainage Basins Mangroves Biodiversity Conservation Infrastructure Land Cover and Land Use Floods and Droughts Fires Excerpts from the book can also be found at https://sustainableos.international/book.html About the author: The author's expertise combines technical and project management skills for sustainable development and climate change adaptation initiatives, with experience working in diverse sectors, including forestry, marine and coastal environments, urban and rural infrastructure, water resources management, agriculture and aquaculture. The author has over 25 years of experience in geospatial and climate data analysis and visualisation. Countries of experience: Thailand (where the author is based), Vietnam, Cambodia, UK, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Lao PDR, Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Benin, Botswana, Nigeria, Ireland, Greece, United States of America, Belize, Bermuda.