viewscape: Viewscape Analysis

Provides tools for viewscape analysis from one or multiple viewpoints using a digital surface or elevation model. Core functionality includes computing viewsheds, quantifying visual magnitude, calculating a suite of viewscape configuration metrics (extent, depth, relief, Sky View Factor, skyline variation, and patch-based landscape structure), Shannon Diversity Index and land cover feature proportions within the visible area, pairwise intervisibility networks, panoramic view generation, and visualizing results as rasters or polygons. Viewscape configuration metrics follow the methods of Tabrizian et al. (2020) <doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2019.103704>. The viewshed algorithm is based on Franklin & Ray (1994) <https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:10680920> and Wang et al. (2000) <https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:131687018>. Visual magnitude is derived from Chamberlain & Meitner (2013) <doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2013.01.003>. Sky View Factor is computed following Oke (1981) <doi:10.1002/joc.3370010304> as implemented in the 'shadow' package (Dorman et al. 2019) <doi:10.32614/RJ-2019-024>.

Version: 3.0.0
Depends: R (≥ 4.2)
Imports: Rcpp, rlang, methods, dplyr, sf, sp, terra, ForestTools (≥ 1.0.1), parallel, pbmcapply
LinkingTo: Rcpp
Suggests: testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown, greenSD, dsmSearch
Published: 2026-06-27
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.viewscape
Author: Xiaohao Yang [aut, cre, cph], Nathan Fox [aut], Derek Van Berkel [aut], Mark Lindquist [aut]
Maintainer: Xiaohao Yang <xiaohaoy111 at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/billbillbilly/viewscape/issues
License: GPL-3
URL: https://github.com/billbillbilly/viewscape
NeedsCompilation: yes
CRAN checks: viewscape results

Documentation:

Reference manual: viewscape.html , viewscape.pdf
Vignettes: viewscape (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: viewscape_3.0.0.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: viewscape_2.0.2.zip, r-release: viewscape_2.0.2.zip, r-oldrel: viewscape_2.0.2.zip
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): viewscape_3.0.0.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): viewscape_3.0.0.tgz, r-release (x86_64): viewscape_3.0.0.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): viewscape_3.0.0.tgz
Old sources: viewscape archive

Linking:

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