R Observatory: Metrics for slopes version 2.0.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

slopes

2.0.0Package record

Calculate Slopes of Roads, Rivers and Trajectories

0packages depend

2.4Kdownloads / year

70.9%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Robin LovelaceCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗rOpenSci review: issue 420 ↗

Calculates the slope (longitudinal gradient or steepness) of linear geographic features such as roads (for more details, see Ariza-López et al. (2019) doi:10.1038/s41597-019-0147-x) and rivers (for more details, see Cohen et al. (2018) doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2018.06.066). It can use local Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data or download DEM data via the 'ceramic' package. The package also provides functions to add elevation data to linestrings and visualize elevation profiles.

Changes in 2.0.0

Migrated from the deprecated raster package to terra (closes #60). terra is now a hard dependency (Imports); raster is no longer required or suggested.
elevation_extract(), slope_raster(), and elevation_add() now always use terra. The terra = argument is deprecated (with a message) and ignored.
elevation_get() now always returns a SpatRaster. The output_format = argument is deprecated and ignored.
slope_matrix_to_raster() and slope_xyz_simple() now work with SpatRaster objects. Legacy Raster* objects are accepted with an automatic conversion message for backwards compatibility.
The bundled dataset has been renamed from dem_lisbon_raster to dem_lisbon and is now a SpatRaster object (was a RasterLayer).
Fixed CRAN --run-donttest failure: the ceramic/Mapbox-dependent example in elevation_add() is now wrapped in \dontrun{} instead of \donttest{} (closes #72).

Show all changes in 2.0.0Hide the rest of the changes in 2.0.0

Fixed slopes_palette() hardcoded testing logic, allowing it to correctly return any number of requested colors for the "Green-Brown" palette.
Substantially improved overall package test coverage (from ~59% to over 84%) by adding test wrappers for plot functions and matrix conversion utilities.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("slopes", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("ropensci/slopes")

Development version from ropensci/slopes. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-slopes

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-slopes

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-slopes

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 2.5 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-04
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 2.0.0

READMEYes · 572 wordsVignettesYes · 5 · dynamicNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 2.0.0Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 37
Examples that run: 100%6 run in a plain check
Exported functions with examples: 26%
Documented parameters: 99%
Return-value docs: 91%
Help pages citing references: 0%

Vignettes (5)

Get started HTML
An introduction to slopes HTML
Benchmarking slopes calculation HTML
Example: gradients of a road network for a given city HTML
Verification of slopes HTML

How these are measured

Downloads

2.4K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #11,635 · ~6/day · ~196/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

35830 days

91690 days

2.4K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on97 r2u5 autocran

How downloads are counted

Repository

ropensci/slopes ↗Organization: ropensci

78Stars

8Forks

4Open issues

0Open PRs

3Releases

357Commits

8Commit identities

License file reads as GPL-3.0 · 357 commits · Last activity 2026-06-25 · 0% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 93%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 68
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2025-06-14 · 712026-09-04 · 78

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

15 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 8 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/ropensci/slopes on 2026-10-11.

Continuous integration (3)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflowtic

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Governance and community (2)

Code of conductContributing guide

Docs source (3)

README.Rmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-06-16

pkgdown site last built 2026-06-16, before release 2.0.0 (2026-06-25)

Coverage (1)

Coverage reporting (Codecov)

Show all practicesHide 4 practices

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

data-raw/

CRAN release process (2)

cran-comments.mdCRAN-SUBMISSION

Research and citation (2)

codemeta.jsonJOSS paper

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

AI coding toolsBeta

This repository shows signs of AI coding tools.

GitHub Copilotfirst seen 2026-05-28
Pull request: opened by its own account

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (updated 2026-09-27)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

18 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing slopes adds 13 packages (11 with compiled code, 21 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: sf 9.3 MB, s2 2.8 MB, colorspace 2.0 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 2.10

Imports (6)

sf terramethodspbapply geodist colorspace

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (13)

knitr rmarkdown ceramic bookdown covr testthat osmextract stplanr dplyr tmap leaflet bench rlang

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

Datasets

People & History

People (6)

Author

Author

Author

Reviewer

Dan reviewed the package for rOpenSci, see https://github.com/ropensci/software-review/issues/420#issuecomment-857662657

Andy Teucher

Reviewer

Andy reviewed the package for rOpenSci, see…

Releases (3)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

2.0.0Latest
record
2026-06-25 · current release · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
slope_breaks, slope_colors
unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2026-06-17
1.0.2
record
2026-06-17 · diff ↗ ·
removed 9 exports
z_cumulative_difference, z_direction, z_elevation_change_start_end, z_end, z_max, z_mean, z_min, z_start, z_value

added 6 exports
dem_lisbon, route_to_segments, slope_matrices, slope_matrix_to_raster, slope_xyz_simple, slopes_palette
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2026-05-24
issues were not corrected in time
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
1.0.1
record
2025-06-23
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11

Package metadata

First published: 2025-06-23
Total releases: 3 / 1 yrs
License: GPL-3 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 2.10
Bundled data: 109 KB / 9 files
Download size: 2.1 MB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("slopes")

Format

Lovelace, R., Félix, R., Matos, G., Olner, D., Talbot, J., & Teucher, A. (2026). slopes: Calculate Slopes of Roads, Rivers and Trajectories (Version 2.0.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.slopes

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

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

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for slopes version 2.0.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-18. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-18, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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