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dggridR: Discrete Global Grids for R

Spatial Analysis Done Right

You want to do spatial statistics, and it’s going to involve binning.

Binning with a rectangular grid introduces messy distortions. At the macro-scale using a rectangular grid does things like making Greenland bigger than the United States and Antarctica the largest continent.

Mercator Projection
Mercator Projection

But this kind of distortion is present no matter what the resolution is; in fact, it shows up whenever you project a sphere onto a plane.

What you want are bins of equal size, regardless of where they are on the globe, regardless of their resolution.

dggridR solves this problem.

dggridR builds discrete global grids which partition the surface of the Earth into hexagonal, triangular, or diamond cells, all of which have the same size. (There are some minor caveats which are detailed in the vignettes.)

Discrete Global Grid in use
Discrete Global Grid in use

(Naturally, you can use much smaller cells than those shown in the image above.)

This package includes everything you need to make spatial binning great again.

Many details and examples are included in the vignette.

Installation

dggridR is available from CRAN via:

install.packages('dggridR')

If you want your code to be as up-to-date as possible, you can install it using:

install.packages('dggridR', repos = 'https://fastverse.r-universe.dev')

Show me some code

Okay.

Your analysis could be as easy as this:

library(dggridR)
library(collapse)

#Construct a global grid with cells approximately 1000 miles across
dggs          <- dgconstruct(spacing=1000, metric=FALSE, resround='down')

#Load included test data set
data(dgquakes)

#Get the corresponding grid cells for each earthquake epicenter (lat-long pair)
dgquakes$cell <- dgGEO_to_SEQNUM(dggs, dgquakes$lon, dgquakes$lat)$seqnum

#Get the number of earthquakes in each equally-sized cell
quakecounts   <- dgquakes |> fcount(cell)

Show me more examples!

In R, typing

vignette('dggridR')

will bring up many examples.

But I want higher resolution grids than that

Many different grid resolutions are available for many different grids. The following chart shows the number of cells, their area, and statistics regarding the spacing of their center nodes for the ISEA3H grid type.

Res Number of Cells Cell Area (km^2) Min Max Mean Std
1 32 17,002,187.39080 4,156.18000 4,649.10000 4,320.49000 233.01400
2 92 5,667,395.79693 2,324.81000 2,692.72000 2,539.69000 139.33400
3 272 1,889,131.93231 1,363.56000 1,652.27000 1,480.02000 89.39030
4 812 629,710.64410 756.96100 914.27200 855.41900 52.14810
5 2,432 209,903.54803 453.74800 559.23900 494.95900 29.81910
6 7,292 69,967.84934 248.80400 310.69300 285.65200 17.84470
7 21,872 23,322.61645 151.22100 187.55000 165.05800 9.98178
8 65,612 7,774.20548 82.31100 104.47000 95.26360 6.00035
9 196,832 2,591.40183 50.40600 63.00970 55.02260 3.33072
10 590,492 863.80061 27.33230 35.01970 31.75960 2.00618
11 1,771,472 287.93354 16.80190 21.09020 18.34100 1.11045
12 5,314,412 95.97785 9.09368 11.70610 10.58710 0.66942
13 15,943,232 31.99262 5.60065 7.04462 6.11367 0.37016
14 47,829,692 10.66421 3.02847 3.90742 3.52911 0.22322
15 143,489,072 3.55473 1.86688 2.35058 2.03789 0.12339
16 430,467,212 1.18491 1.00904 1.30335 1.17638 0.07442
17 1,291,401,632 0.39497 0.62229 0.78391 0.67930 0.04113
18 3,874,204,892 0.13166 0.33628 0.43459 0.39213 0.02481
19 11,622,614,672 0.04389 0.20743 0.26137 0.22643 0.01371
20 34,867,844,012 0.01463 0.11208 0.14489 0.13071 0.00827

Credits

The src/ directory contains a vendored copy of DGGRID v9.0b by Kevin Sahr, maintained as a fork at SebKrantz/DGGRID.

Richard Barnes built the original R package and hand-written Rcpp bridge, including:

  • Replacement of gpclib with clipper, making DGGRID fully FLOSS
  • Restructuring of makefiles and include paths to enable compilation in R
  • Direct inclusion of the shapelib library
  • Addition of the SEQTOPOLY option under the GENERATE_GRID faculty
  • Fixes for GCC 6, ISO C conformance, and -Wall/-pedantic warnings

Sebastian Krantz has made the following additions (v3.1.0 onward):

  • Updated the bundled DGGRID engine from v7 to v9.0b and re-architected the Rcpp bridge
  • Fixed numeric precision issues on Apple Silicon
  • Replaced dplyr/rlang/sp with collapse and sf; cell polygons are assembled in C and converted with sf::st_as_sfc(), yielding significant performance gains
  • Added aperture-7 grids (ISEA7H, FULLER7H) and mixed-aperture grids (ISEA43H, FULLER43H)
  • Added dgneighbors(), dgchildren(), dgparent() for cell-relationship queries
  • Added dgpoints_to_cells() and dgbin_points() for point aggregation
  • Added densify parameter to grid-materialization functions
  • Added orient = "RANDOM" to dgconstruct() for random icosahedral orientation

The package relies on several bundled libraries, as noted in the Licensing section below.

Licensing

This package is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 or later (AGPL ≥ 3), as stated in LICENSE.md.

The following bundled libraries in src/ have their own licenses:

  • clipper: Boost Software License v1.0 (Angus Johnson)
  • dggrid: Released as public domain software by Kevin Sahr
  • proj4lib: Released into the public domain by Gerald Evenden
  • shapelib: MIT-style license (Frank Warmerdam)

Disclaimer

This package should operate in the manner described here, in the package’s main documentation, and in Kevin Sahr’s dggrid documentation. Unfortunately, none of us are paid enough to make absolutely, doggone certain that that’s the case. That said, if you find bugs or are seeking enhancements, we want to hear about them.

Citing this Package

Please cite this package as:

Richard Barnes, Kevin Sahr, and Sebastian Krantz (2026). dggridR: Discrete Global Grids for R. R package version 4.1.0. https://sebkrantz.github.io/dggridR/ doi:10.5281/zenodo.1322866