combining multiple shapefiles in R

Question

I have a folder with about 100 point shapefiles that are locations obtained while scat sampling of an ungulate species. I would like to merge all these point shapefiles into one shapefile in R. All the point data were in .gpx format initially which I then changed to shapefiles.

I am fairly new to R,so I am very confused as on how to do it and could not find codes that merged or combined more than a few shapefiles. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks!

See: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/264250/merge-two-shapefiles-in-r?rq=1. And note that [gis.se] might be a better place to ask future questions about shapefiles. — MrFlick, Nov 27 '18 at 19:57
Also possible duplicate here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19961898/append-combine-shape-files — MrFlick, Nov 27 '18 at 19:57
Welcome to SO! Can you provide a bit more info (i.e. when you read them what spatial type are they?; are you using sp/rgdal or sf? when you say "merge" what exactly do you mean output-wise/what if there are duplicates?). Also, this might be better served on https://gis.stackexchange.com — hrbrmstr, Nov 27 '18 at 19:58

score 13 · Answer 1 · answered May 08 '20 at 15:14

13

Building on @M_Merciless .. for long lists you can use

all_schools <- do.call(rbind, shapefile_list)

Or, alternatively, the very fast:

all_schools <- sf::st_as_sf(data.table::rbindlist(x))

answered May 08 '20 at 15:14

bevingtona

301
2
6

bind_rows from dplyr package will also work on lists, dplyr::bind_rows(shapefile_list) – Dave M Apr 27 '21 at 16:57

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 23 '20 at 12:20

library(sf)

list all the shapefiles within the folder location

file_list <- list.files("shapefile/folder/location", pattern = "*shp", full.names = TRUE)

read all shapefiles, store as a list

shapefile_list <- lapply(file_list, read_sf)

append the separate shapefiles, in my example there are 4 shapefiles, this can probably be improved by using a for loop or apply function for a longer list.

all_schools <- rbind(shapefile_list[[1]], shapefile_list[[2]], shapefile_list[[3]], shapefile_list[[4]])

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 06 '23 at 18:42

Adding a solution that I think is "tidier"

library(fs)
library(tidyverse)

# Getting all file paths
shapefiles <- 'my/data/folder' |>
  dir_ls(recurse = TRUE) |>
  str_subset('.shp$')

# Loading all files
sfdf <- shapefiles |>
  map(st_read) |>
  bind_rows()

Admittedly, more lines of code but personally I think the code is much easier to read and comprehend this way.

combining multiple shapefiles in R

3 Answers3

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