R package for time-series animation of rasters

R package for time-series animation of rasters

m

June 18, 2021

One of remote sensing’s greatest strengths is its capability to deliver consistent and highly resolved time series. These have a wonderful potential for visualizations and analysis.
Creating a fluid and pretty animation from a collection of tifs can be complicated, as it involves a number of steps:

  • Filling gaps in the raster
  • Creating consistent spatial plots
  • Enhancing and decorating the plots
  • Adding ancillary animated charts

Our new R package rtsVis simplifies and assists in all these processing steps. Using just a few functions, you can get from a list of input images to animation-ready ggplots.

rtsVis can create animations of discrete, gradient, and multiband rasters (RGB). It connects nicely to the ImageFusion, moveVis, and rHarmonics packages which offer additional tools for raster time series.

The package allows for the creation of animated charts that go along with the animated rasters. A variety of plot types are available by default and user-made plot types are supported, so you can leverage the full power of ggplot.

For examples, and a guide on how to create custom plot functions, check out the Demo repository.

rtsVis is available on CRAN. The package is in development, with bugs getting fixed and features getting added. Get in touch if you want to contribute!

follow us and share it on:

you may also like:

Course on urban EO by Michael Wurm

Course on urban EO by Michael Wurm

Walk through any city and you pick up on things that are hard to put a number on. The noise of a main road, the heat that sits between buildings in summer, the question of whether that little park around the corner is really enough green space for the whole...

EireR R package: unified gateway to Irish geospatial data

EireR R package: unified gateway to Irish geospatial data

Anyone who's tried to do geospatial work across the whole island of Ireland knows the headache. Ireland is one island geographically, but it's split across two jurisdictions, the Republic and Northern Ireland, and each one runs its own data infrastructure. Different...

Impact of agrophotovoltaic facilities – an R package

Impact of agrophotovoltaic facilities – an R package

There's a new R package on the block, and it's solving a problem that sounds simple until you actually try to do it: how do you tell whether putting solar panels over a farm field is good or bad for the soil and the crops around them? Marlene, one of our EAGLE...

Presentation at the Kolloquium of the Technical University of Graz

Presentation at the Kolloquium of the Technical University of Graz

Dr. Ariane Droin presented the works of her PhD-Thesis at the Geo-Kolloquium of the Technical University of Graz with the title "Hochauflösende, skalenübergreifende Modellierung von Nachbarschaftserreichbarkeiten im urbanen Raum" on the 17th of June 2026. She showed...

Academic Evolution in Earth Observation

Academic Evolution in Earth Observation

A while ago, we shared a lighthearted post about our EORC Earth observation characters. What stayed with us afterward were the reactions from colleagues around the world. Quite a few professors commented, half joking and half serious, that sometimes they wish they...

Share This