spanner: Utilities to Support Lidar Applications at the Landscape, Forest, and Tree Scale

Implements algorithms for terrestrial, mobile, and airborne lidar processing, tree detection, segmentation, and attribute estimation (Donager et al., 2021) <doi:10.3390/rs13122297>, and a hierarchical patch delineation algorithm 'PatchMorph' (Girvetz & Greco, 2007) <doi:10.1007/s10980-007-9104-8>. Tree detection uses rasterized point cloud metrics (relative neighborhood density and verticality) combined with RANSAC cylinder fitting to locate tree boles and estimate diameter at breast height. Tree segmentation applies graph-theory approaches inspired by Tao et al. (2015) <doi:10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2015.08.007> with cylinder fitting methods from de Conto et al. (2017) <doi:10.1016/j.compag.2017.07.019>. PatchMorph delineates habitat patches across spatial scales using organism-specific thresholds. Built on 'lidR' (Roussel et al., 2020) <doi:10.1016/j.rse.2020.112061>.

Version: 1.0.2
Depends: R (≥ 4.0.0), lidR (≥ 4.2.0)
Imports: Rcpp (≥ 1.0.13), conicfit, FNN, RANN, cppRouting, sf, terra, sfheaders, Rfast, geometry, dplyr, mathjaxr, data.table
LinkingTo: lidR, RcppArmadillo, Rcpp (≥ 1.0.13), RcppEigen, BH
Suggests: testthat (≥ 3.0.0), magick, rgl, rstac
Published: 2026-02-03
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.spanner (may not be active yet)
Author: Andrew Sanchez Meador ORCID iD [aut, cre, ctb], Jonathon Donager ORCID iD [aut, ctb], Blackburn Ryan ORCID iD [aut, ctb], Cannon Jeffery ORCID iD [ctb], Tiago de Conto [ctb, cph] (Author of included TreeLS code), Keith O'Hara [ctb, cph] (Author of included OptimLib code)
Maintainer: Andrew Sanchez Meador <Andrew.SanchezMeador at nau.edu>
License: GPL-3
URL: https://github.com/bi0m3trics/spanner
NeedsCompilation: yes
Citation: spanner citation info
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: spanner results

Documentation:

Reference manual: spanner.html , spanner.pdf

Downloads:

Package source: spanner_1.0.2.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

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