msftBuildingFootprints

Installation

You can install this from GitHub with:

install.packages("devtools") # if needed
devtools::install_github("kaufman-lab/msftBuildingFootprints")

Downloads building footprints from the open Microsoft Maps data set and returns it as an sf data frame.

The primary package function is get_buildings, which handles:

• Downloading and unzipping data from Microsoft
• Loading it into R as an sf data frame.
• Optionally filtering it by county
• Optionally converting building footprints to centroids

Note that Microsoft distributes the data as whole states, which must be loaded in whole into memory even if the user chooses only a subset of counties. California, the largest file, weighs in at 3.35 GB compressed. Therefore running this package for large states can have significant hardware demands.

Example

Mapping building centroids in Lamoille County, Vermont.

library(msftBuildingFootprints)
library(sf)
bldgs <- get_buildings("VT", county_fips = '015', centroid = TRUE)
plot(st_geometry(bldgs))