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I want to create a presence-absence raster out of a shapefile (vector) with the rasterize command of the R-package in R. Until now I only get wrong results.

The raster should just distinguish between the two options ('shapefile on this cell present', 'shapefile on this cell abscent').

I tried it out with several options of the rasterize-command:

forest_polygons_raster_mask <- rasterize(forest_polygons, ras, mask = TRUE)

forest_polygons_raster_update <- rasterize(forest_polygons, ras, update =  
TRUE)

forest_polygons_raster_cov <- rasterize(forest_polygons, ras, getCover = 
TRUE)

the command with the getCover option does not stop, also after several hours. With both of the other commands I get a wrong result and my raster has presence-cells in areas where the shapefile is abscent.

The original shapefile with two holes: :

That is the raster I get after the rasterize command with the update-option. One hole is missing, and the other is split into two smaller holes. No abscence was recognized wrong, just presence was recognized wrong:

Shapefile layer over raster layer, the holes in the shapefile are not left out as abscence in the raster:

Did anyone have a similar problem? What might the problem be? My shapefile is quite ordinary with different fields of the categories: ID, Shape (Polygon), Classification (text), Shape_Area, Shape_Length. The cellsize of the input raster for the rasterize process is quite small (so I do not expect that the errors are due to two big cells).

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    Not sure we can help without getting your data - is that possible? Or something that shows the same problem?
    – Spacedman
    Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 20:11
  • Yes, I completely see your point. Unfortunately it is sensitive data, so I cannot share it and I have never found a similar problem in any other data...
    – Li12
    Commented Aug 2, 2018 at 8:50
  • Without your original data it is tough to figure out what is going on - long run times may be an indication of geometry problems though, have you checked the validity of your vector data?
    – Simbamangu
    Commented Jan 5, 2019 at 12:41

1 Answer 1

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The option that uses getCover = TRUE is correct, but:

  1. This option returns the proportion of cell covered by polygon. So the raster values have a range between 1 and 0 so you can check these values that are greater than 0, but given these magnitude and the R color scales, they seem to be 0 (black).
  2. This option returns 0 as background.
  3. You should change values greater than 0 to 1:

    forest_polygons_raster_cov[forest_polygons_raster_cov[] > 0] <- 1
    

enter image description here

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  • Thanks for the tip! I will try it out and update this thread how it worked out!
    – Li12
    Commented Aug 2, 2018 at 8:51
  • Unfortunately the process with getCover = True seems to not run through. With mask or update = True the runtime is about 2-3 hours. With getCover it did not finish after approximately 17 hours now, even though I parallelized it... Do you have any ideas what the problem is with getCover = True?
    – Li12
    Commented Aug 3, 2018 at 9:29
  • 1
    Can you provide example files? getCover = TRUE split each pixel into 100 parts and calculate the percentage. This makes the processing process even slower. Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 17:13

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