Split Raster (by value) to Multi-Part Polygons

Question

I want to convert a raster to multi-part polygons, using the raster value to determine which polygon each cell becomes a part of. I have provided an example of what I am looking to achieve below, where each cell of the raster is assigned to a single multi-part polygon. If I split the cell values into five intervals, I would want five multipart polygons.

I have attempted to use the "Raster to Polygon" tool in ArcMap, but was unsuccessful because no matter how I used to raster calculator to get rid of decimal points on the raster, decimals continued to remain. Is there a way to do this in R?

Answer 1

The following code first builds a sample data and uses function cut to make 5 classes, then converted to raster; converts to spatial and "dissolves" the polygons, merging together those neighboring polygons which have the same value:

library(raster)

s = sample(1:10,100, replace = T)  # build some sample data
ms = matrix(s, nrow =10)           # turn into a 10 x 10 matrix
rs = raster(ms)                    # the raster with numbers from 0 to 10

m = cut(s, 5, labels = F)       # we use cut to make the 5 classes
mx = matrix(m, nrow =10)        
r = raster(mx)                  # the raster with 5 classes

plot(rs, col =  grDevices::palette.colors(n = 6)[-1]) # 5 classes
raster::text(rs)                # plot the numbers

polys = raster::rasterToPolygons(r, dissolve = T)
print(polys)

class       : SpatialPolygonsDataFrame 
features    : 5 
extent      : 0, 1, 0, 1  (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax)
crs         : NA 
variables   : 1
names       : layer 
min values  :     1 
max values  :     5
plot(polys, col = 2:6)
raster::text(rs)

# in R it is recommendable to use package `sf` for vector data
library(sf)
st_as_sf(polys)