[RS-ecology] R package RStoolbox released

[Martin Wegmann]

Dear all,

We are happy to announce the initial release of our *RStoolbox* package. The 
package has been developed by Benjamin Leutner and will be used extensively in 
the upcoming book “Remote Sensing and GIS for Ecologists – Using Open Source 
software“ (http://book.ecosens.org) due in October. 

The main focus of RStoolbox is to provide a set of high-level remote sensing 
tools for various classification tasks. This includes unsupervised and 
supervised classification with different classifiers, fractional cover 
analysis and a spectral angle mapper. Furthermore, several spectral 
transformations like vegetation indices, principal component analysis or 
tasseled cap transformation are available as well.

Besides that, we provide a set of data import and pre-processing functions. 
These include reading and tidying Landsat meta-data, importing ENVI spectral 
libraries, histogram matching, automatic image co-registration, topographic 
illumination correction and so on.

Last but not least, RStoolbox ships with two functions dedicated to plotting 
remote sensing data (*raster* objects) with *ggplot2* including RGB color 
compositing with various contrast stretching options.

RStoolbox is built on top of the *raster* package. To improve performance some 
functions use embedded C++ code via the *Rcpp* package.
Moreover, most functions have built-in support for parallel processing, which 
is activated by running raster::beginCluster() beforehand.  

We sincerely hope that this package may be helpful for some people and are 
looking forward to any feedback, suggestions and bug reports.

- See more at: 

http://remote-sensing.eu/new-package-r-package-rstoolbox-tools-for-remote-sensing-data-analysis

best regards, Martin

-- 
Dr. Martin Wegmann

Department of Remote Sensing
Remote Sensing and Biodiversity Research
University of Wuerzburg, Germany
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German Aerospace Center (DLR)
German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD)

Phone:  +49-(0)931-31-83446

url: http://www.remote-sensing.uni-wuerzburg.de
url: http://www.dlr.de/eoc
url: http://www.global-change-ecology.org
url: http://www.remote-sensing-biodiversity.org
url: http://www.animove.org

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Associate Editor

*Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation*

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2056-3485