A new R package for working with path and row numbers from the World Reference System (WRS) grids (both WRS-1 and WRS-2) is now available on CRAN.

For more information see the github project page for the wrspathrow package, or see this post.

wrspathrow includes functions for determining the path and row number(s) needed to cover a given spatial object, or, conversely, for returning the polygon for a given path and row. Note that installation of the wrspathrow package may take a bit of time due to the need to download the wrspathrowData package it depends on. The wrspathrowData package is approximately 26MB in size, as it includes the full WRS-1 and WRS-2 vector grids in R format. My thanks to the USGS for allowing the re-release of these reformatted datafiles on CRAN. See the USGS WRS-1 and WRS-2 shapefile download page for the original source of these files.