The website http://projectionwizard.org/ offers a very easy way to get an appropriate projection system based on a bounding box and choosing whether projection criterion should be equal-area, equi-distant or a comprimise.
It is based on this publication that defines some principles on how to select an adequate projection system:
Jenny, B., Šavrič, B., Arnold, N. D., Marston, B. E. and Preppernau, C. A. (2017). A guide to selecting map projections for world and hemisphere maps. In: M. Lapaine and E. L. Usery (eds), Choosing a Map Projection, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography (pp. 213–228). Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer. Doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-51835-0_9
I would like to know if there is any similar tool for R (or Python) that can achieve the same. So e.g. based on a shapefile in WGS84 find an adequate projection system for the shape with equalarea as the main criterion.
Relevance: to calculate areas in R without having to manually find a projection system. Currently I only know of the function area
in the raster
package. However, this function does not use a projected coordinate system. From it's description:
Compute the approximate surface area of cells in an unprojected (longitude/latitude) Raster object. It is an approximation because area is computed as the height (latitudial span) of a cell (which is constant among all cells) times the width (longitudinal span) in the (latitudinal) middle of a cell. The width is smaller at the poleward side than at the equator-ward side of a cell. This variation is greatest near the poles and the values are thus not very precise for very high latitudes.