Geographical Grid Distances and Routes for Heterogeneous Spaces

The gdistance package provides classes and functions for calculating distances and routes on geographical grids. It implements measures for modeling dispersal histories, including least-cost distances and distances based on constrained random walks. The package was authored by Jacob van Etten and builds on methods first presented by van Etten and Hijmans in 2010.

Use Cases

• Modeling dispersal histories in geographical genetics based on implemented distance measures.
• Calculating accessibility indicators based on least-cost distances across heterogeneous spaces.
• Performing geospatial analysis based on distances derived from constrained random walks.

Strengths

• Implements distance measures from a peer-reviewed publication (van Etten and Hijmans, 2010).
• Supports multiple complex distance calculation methods, including least-cost and random-walk based.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Jacob van Etten

Collection Method

Software package implementing published geographical methods.

Time Range

Methods originally published in 2010.

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Heterogeneous geographic spaces represented as grids.