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I am interested in knowing the difference between tools: intersect {raster} and gIntersection {rgeos}** tools in R. I have several overlapping polygons and I am interested in their overlap, but mostly in spatially merging their attribute tables. From my resulting shp splitted in multiple polygons, I want to calculate area of each of polygons using gArea {rgeos}.

Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of? For both intersection processes and for subsequent areas calculation?

For the moment I found intersect{raster} more satisfactory for my purpose as it keep "SpatialPolygonsDataFrame" (SPDF) and even merge polygons data.frames. However many online helps propose instead gIntersection {rgeos} which produces just "SpatialPolygons" not even "SPDF". There is not really difference in computation time.

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There is no real difference other than the class of the returned object. The raster intersect function is a helper function that, for polygons, calls gIntersection from rgeos (not rgdal). I would recommend using raster's intersect functions because it will save you some steps in getting back to a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object. One good way to explore these types of questions is to download the package source code and look at how it is structured and what it is doing.

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  • Thank you ! I even corrected the name of package - sorry, I didn't verified it..
    – maycca
    Aug 5, 2015 at 23:26
  • it is really great and helpful to obtain advise/information from the person much more familiar with R and its functions ;)
    – maycca
    Aug 6, 2015 at 0:09
  • i would like to raise the difference I am getting with gIntersection and raster::intersection: When intersecting a large feature with many small ones (some overlap), the former handles polygon holes while the latter does not.
    – Sam
    Feb 20, 2017 at 9:54

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