Compute the distance between two locations along a linear shape

Computes distance between two sites along a linear shape (e.g. a river, a road, etc.). This function uses parallel computing to speed up the distance computation.

distance_along(
  sites,
  along,
  density = 0.01,
  type = "regular",
  mc.cores = parallel::detectCores() - 1,
  ...
)

Arguments

sites: an sf object of type POINT. A spatial object containing coordinates of sites. Note that the first column must be the site identifier.
along: an sf object of type LINESTRING. A spatial object containing coordinates of the linear shape (e.g. a river, a road, etc.) to follow while computing distances between the two sites.
density: a numeric of length 1. The density of points to sample on the linear structure. See sf::st_line_sample() for further detail. Default is 1/100.
type: a character of length 1. The method to sample points on the linear shape. Either regular (default) or random.
mc.cores: an integer of length 1. The number of cores to use (must be lesser than the number of cores available on the machine obtained with parallel::detectCores()).
...: other argument to pass to sf::st_line_sample().

Value

A three-column data.frame with:

from, the first site
to, the second site
weight, the distance between the two sites along the linear shape

Examples

## Add an example ----