terra

terra is an R package that replaces raster. It has a very similar interface, but it is simpler and much faster. The first (beta-) release was on 20 March 2020.

terra is written in C++. Classes, methods and properties are exposed via a Rcpp module. The R side has two main classes (SpatRaster and SpatVector) that represent spatial data. These classes are used to provide a standard R user-interface. There are tutorials at rspatial.org/terra.

Installation

terra is available from CRAN, so you can use install.packages("terra").

See below for instructions on installing the development version

All OS

First install the packages that terra depends on

install.packages(c("raster", "Rcpp"))

Windows

If you are on Windows, you need to first install Rtools to get a C++ compiler that R can use.

Then, in R, install the package.

remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")

MacOS

First install gdal and proj with homebrew

brew install pkg-config
brew install gdal

Followed by

remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")

This should work on Catalina. For other versions, especially for Big Sur, first see the instructions for sf

Linux

The GDAL (>= 3.0.4), GEOS (>= 3.3.0) and PROJ (>= 6.0.0) libraries are required

To install these on Ubuntu version 18.04 (Bionic) you can do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev 

And now, in R, install the package

remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")

See the sf instructions for installation on other linux systems --- and for possible updates/improvements on the above instructions. But note that terra depends on on more recent versions of GDAL and PROJ libraries