UK Terrain & Rugby Geography

UK Terrain & Rugby Geography#

🗺️ UK Terrain & Rugby Geography

Raster and vector spatial analysis with tidyterra

Project Overview#

This project uses the tidyterra R package to work with raster and vector spatial data in a familiar tidyverse-style workflow. We combine freely available global grids—national SRTM-based elevation from geodata and (in the first notebook) WorldClim temperature—with country boundaries from rnaturalearth, then overlay English Premiership, United Rugby Championship, Super Rugby, and French Top 14 stadium locations to produce publication-quality maps.

The emphasis is on reproducible geospatial pipelines: harmonising coordinate reference systems, clipping rasters to national boundaries or regional extents, deriving categorical elevation bands, and linking point observations to gridded terrain.

Project Structure#

The analysis is organised into five R Markdown notebooks:

⛰️ 1. Terrain & climate

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UK elevation (hypsometric mapping) and faceted seasonal mean temperature from WorldClim

🏉 2. Premiership overlay

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English Premiership grounds on UK elevation, table, bar chart, and map

🏆 3. URC overlay

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United Rugby Championship stadiums across Ireland, the UK, Italy, and South Africa

🌏 4. Super Rugby overlay

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Super Rugby franchises in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa — elevation table, bar charts, static maps, and interactive Leaflet maps

🇫🇷 5. Top 14 overlay

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French Top 14 grounds on national elevation — table, bar chart, static map, and interactive Leaflet map

Key Questions#

  • How does tidyterra let us treat SpatRaster objects with dplyr-style verbs while keeping raster semantics?

  • What do multi-layer rasters represent for monthly climate, and how do we pick representative seasonal slices?

  • Where do Premiership, URC, Super Rugby, and Top 14 stadiums sit in regional relief, and what does that imply about geography (e.g. coastal vs Highveld vs Massif Central)?

Data Sources#

Source

Role

geodata

National elevation (elevation_30s for GBR, IRL, ITA, ZAF, NZL, AUS, FRA) and WorldClim country extracts (worldclim_country)

rnaturalearth

Country boundaries (medium scale) as sf / SpatVector

Manual coordinates

Premiership (10), URC (16), Super Rugby (14), and Top 14 (14) stadium centre points (WGS84); edit the notebooks to refine

All downloads require an internet connection at build time; files are cached under tempdir() by default in the notebooks.

Technical Approach#

Raster–vector alignment
CRS checks before crop / mask
tidyterra verbs
mutate, select, rename on SpatRaster
ggplot2 integration
geom_spatraster, geom_spatvector, thematic palettes
Point extraction
terra::extract() at stadium locations

Expected Outcomes#

✅ Publication-style UK elevation and temperature maps
✅ Derived layers (elevation bands, seasonal subsets) using tidyterra
✅ Club-level terrain context for Premiership, URC, Super Rugby, and Top 14 geography
✅ Reproducible R Markdown notebooks for Jupyter Book
Contents