But if you would like to do this using longitude/latitude data, you could try dist2Lines in 'geosphere'
library(geosphere) dist2Line(points, SpatialPolygons) (this function ONLY works for lon/lat, and NOT for a flat earth coordinate system) Robert On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Rolf Turner <r.tur...@auckland.ac.nz> wrote: > > On 1/11/2010, at 7:38 AM, Peter Larson wrote: > >> Hello all, >> >> I have a database of point (lat long) data. >> I also have shapefiles of polygon and line data. >> >> I need to find the distances from each of the points to 1) the nearest >> polygon and 2) the nearest line. >> >> Is this possible? > > > In R all things are possible. > > You may have problems with units; the units in which your points are expressed > must be the same as those in which the lines and polygons are expressed. > > If you can express everything in terms of two dimensional Euclidean units, > then the facilities of spatstat will allow you to do what you want. Currently > spatstat does not handle great circle distances. > > If you express your collection of polygons as a single owin object, say > "xxx", then > distfun(xxx)(x,y) will give the distances from to xxx. These will be the > minima of the distances from the points to the individual polygons. > > Likewise if you express your collection of lines as a psp object, say "lll", > then distfun(lll)(x,y) will the distance from each point to the nearest line. > > In the foregoing "x" represents the vector of x-coordinates of your points, > and y the vector of y-coordinates. > > See > > vignette("shapefiles") > > for instructions on how to turn shapefile data into spatstat style objects. > > cheers, > > Rolf > _______________________________________________ > R-sig-Geo mailing list > R-sig-Geo@stat.math.ethz.ch > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo > _______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo@stat.math.ethz.ch https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo