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whitebox: 'WhiteboxTools' R Frontend

Source: R/whitebox-package.R
whitebox-package.Rd

An R frontend for the 'WhiteboxTools' library, which is an advanced geospatial data analysis platform developed by Prof. John Lindsay at the University of Guelph's Geomorphometry and Hydrogeomatics Research Group. 'WhiteboxTools' can be used to perform common geographical information systems (GIS) analysis operations, such as cost-distance analysis, distance buffering, and raster reclassification. Remote sensing and image processing tasks include image enhancement (e.g. panchromatic sharpening, contrast adjustments), image mosaicing, numerous filtering operations, simple classification (k-means), and common image transformations. 'WhiteboxTools' also contains advanced tooling for spatial hydrological analysis (e.g. flow-accumulation, watershed delineation, stream network analysis, sink removal), terrain analysis (e.g. common terrain indices such as slope, curvatures, wetness index, hillshading; hypsometric analysis; multi-scale topographic position analysis), and LiDAR data processing. Suggested citation: Lindsay (2016) doi:10.1016/j.cageo.2016.07.003 .

Package options

  • whitebox.exe_path - character. Path to executable file. The default value is the package installation directory, subdirectory "WBT", followed by whitebox_tools.exe or whitebox_tools. Set the whitebox.exe_path option using wbt_init() exe_path argument

  • whitebox.wd - character. Path to WhiteboxTools working directory. Used as --wd argument for tools that support it when wd is not specified elsewhere. Note that once you have set a working directory, the directory needs to be reset to "replace" the old value; just dropping the flag will not change the working directory back to your original R working directory. To "unset" the option in the R package you can use wbt_wd("") which is equivalent to wbt_wd(getwd()). The WhiteboxTools settings and the package settings will be updated to reflect the directory change after running the next tool and the --wd flag will be dropped from system calls.

  • whitebox.verbose - logical. Should standard output from calls to executable be cat() out for readability? Default is result of interactive(). Individual tools may have verbose_mode setting that produce only single-line output when FALSE. These argument values are left as the defaults defined in the package documentation for that function. When whitebox.verbose=FALSE no output is produced. Set the value of whitebox.verbose with wbt_verbose() verbose argument.

  • whitebox.compress_rasters - logical. Should raster output from WhiteboxTools be compressed? Default: FALSE. Set the value of whitebox.compress_rasters with wbt_compress_rasters() compress_rasters argument.

  • whitebox.max_procs - integer. Maximum number of processes for tools that run in parallel or partially parallelize. Default: -1 uses all of the available cores.

The package options can be overridden with system environment variables: R_WHITEBOX_EXE_PATH, R_WHITEBOX_WD, R_WHITEBOX_VERBOSE, R_WHITEBOX_COMPRESS_RASTERS and R_WHITEBOX_MAX_PROCS.

See also

wbt_init(), wbt_options(), install_whitebox()

Author

Maintainer: Andrew Brown brown.andrewg@gmail.com [contributor]

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