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fields

17.3

Tools for Spatial Data

234packages depend
655.3Kdownloads / year
48.9%test coverage
8/13checks pass

Overview

About
Maintained by Douglas NychkaFirst published 2001-07-2780 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

For curve, surface and function fitting with an emphasis on splines, spatial data, geostatistics, and spatial statistics. The major methods include cubic, and thin plate splines, Kriging, and compactly supported covariance functions for large data sets. The splines and Kriging methods are supported by functions that can determine the smoothing parameter (nugget and sill variance) and other covariance function parameters by cross validation and also by restricted maximum likelihood. For Kriging there is an easy to use function that also estimates the correlation scale (range parameter). A major feature is that any covariance function implemented in R and following a simple format can be used for spatial prediction. There are also many useful functions for plotting and working with spatial data as images. This package also contains an implementation of sparse matrix methods for large spatial data sets and currently requires the sparse matrix (spam) package. Use help(fields) to get started and for an overview. All graphics functions focus on using base R graphics. The fields source code is deliberately commented and provides useful explanations of numerical details as a companion to the manual pages. The commented source code can be viewed by expanding the source code version and looking in the R subdirectory. The reference for fields can be generated by the citation function in R and has DOI doi:10.5065/D6W957CT. Development of this package was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant 1417857, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Colorado School of Mines. See the Fields URL for a vignette on using this package and some background on spatial statistics.

Install

Health

CRAN checks
5NOTE8OK
Failing flavors
  • NOTE r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-clang
  • NOTE r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc
  • NOTE r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang
  • NOTE r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-gcc
  • NOTE r-devel-windows-x86_64
Slowest check: 10.5 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64
Code health
Yes
Tests · ratio 0.41
48.9%
Coverage · measured lines
5
Dependencies · direct
Check history
  • NOTE2026-07-24
    9 OK · 4 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
  • ERROR2026-07-23
    9 OK · 3 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
  • NOTE2026-07-11
    12 OK · 1 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
  • OK2026-05-09
    13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
  • WARNING2026-03-10
    11 OK · 0 NOTE · 3 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

Documentation
READMENoVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSNoCode of conductNoContributing guideNo
Examples that run
96%
Documented parameters
not tracked
Return-value docs
not tracked
References docs
6%

Downloads

655.3K
CRAN downloads in the past year
Rank #451 · ~1.8K/day · ~54.6K/mo
Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.
37.4K30 days
183.1K90 days
655.3K1 year
Compare downloads with other packages →
Also on7.5K r2u206 autocran37K conda_forge829 bioconda285 c2d4u

Repository

Repository
16Stars
6Forks
4Open issues
1Open PRs
0Releases
52Commits
1Contributors
License GPL-2.0 · 52 commits · Last activity 2026-05-08

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

Checks run against github.com/dnychka/fieldsrpackage on 2026-08-16.

No development-tooling practices detected in the upstream repository.

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies
5 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)
Depends (5)
Imports (1)
LinkingTo (0)
none
Suggests (1)
Enhances (0)
none

Code & Tests

Datasets

People & History

People (7)
Maintainer (1)
Author, Maintainer · added in 2.7.0
Authors (7)
Author, Maintainer · added in 2.7.0
Author · added in 2.7.0
Author · added in 9.9
Author · added in 9.9
Author · added in 16.2
Author · added in 8.3-5
Author · added in 3.0.3
Listed in earlier versions (3)
no longer listed · 1.0 to 4.1
no longer listed · 2.7.0 to 6.8
no longer listed · 9.8-3 to 15.2
Package Timeline

80 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

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    R 3.1.0 released · 2014-04-10
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    R 2.1.0 released · 2005-04-18
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    R 2.0.0 released · 2004-10-04
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    R 1.6.0 released · 2002-10-01
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    R 1.5.0 released · 2002-04-29
  • 1.1
    2001-12-12 · diff ↗
  • 1.0
    2001-07-27

Package metadata

First published
2001-07-27
Total releases
80 / 25 yrs
License
GPL (>= 2) OSI
Minimum R
≥ 4.0.0
Bundled data
3.5 MB / 17 files
Download size
3.9 MB
Installed size
not tracked yet
With dependencies
not tracked yet
Appears in task views

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("fields")
Nychka, D., Furrer, R., Gerber, F., Iverson, M., Johnson, R., Paige, J., & Sain, S. (2026). fields: Tools for Spatial Data (Version 17.3) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.fields

This is what citation() produces when a package has no citation file of its own. If it prints something else, use that.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for fields version 17.3 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-08-16. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-08-16, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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