Last week at the Davis R Users’ Group Robert Hijmans gave a talk about spatial data analysis in R. Robert is a professor of biogeography at UC Davis and the author of the raster (analysis of gridded data), dismo (species distribution modeling), and geosphere (spherical trigonometry), packages.
Robert’s presentation spanned topics including basic geographical data and geostatistics concepts, his raster package and its usage, and some great examples of visualization and other resources. Here are his slides:
Robert has also written an introduction to spatial modeling for R beginners which reviews very basic data handling and the sp and raster packages. Finally, his package vignettes are great resources for specific topics: