How to compute distances along a network in shapefile? in R

Question

I have a river network in a shapefile (class: "SpatialLinesDataFrame"), with some points on it (see picture below).

I would like to compute the distances between points, but along the rivers. I have been searching a lot and I am not able to find any function that allows directly that.

The closest thing I have found is the function "networkdistance" in the package "secrlinear", however I don't manage to transform my shapefile into the format required to use the function (a "linearmask" object).

Any help with this would be extremely appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Tina.

Answer 1

I know this is an old thread, but just in case someone runs across this in the future: I just released an R package (riverdist) that deals with this issue, and also provides some tools for network editing and data summaries & visualization. It was written with fisheries work in mind, but could probably be applied to what you're working on, or at least that's the hope!

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/riverdist/vignettes/riverdist_vignette.html

Sorry this wasn't more timely -

Answer 2

I think we resolved this problem offline: the geographic coordinates (lat/long) of the shapefile needed to be projected before they could be used in secrlinear. That package approximates the linear network and uses igraph functions for distances.