fields

17.3

Tools for Spatial Data

235packages depend

650.8Kdownloads / year

48.9%test coverage

9/13checks 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

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

install.packages("fields", 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("dnychka/fieldsRPackage")

Development version from dnychka/fieldsRPackage. 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-fields

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

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-fields

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-fields

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

1ERROR3NOTE9OK

Failing flavors

NOTE r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-clang
ERROR r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc
NOTE r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-gcc
NOTE r-devel-windows-x86_64

Slowest check: 11.7 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang

Code health

Yes

Tests · ratio 0.41

48.9%

Coverage · measured lines

Dependencies · direct

Check history

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

READMENoVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSNoCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 96%
Documented parameters: not tracked
Return-value docs: not tracked
References docs: 6%

Downloads

650.8K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #426 · ~1.8K/day · ~54.2K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

41.4K30 days

210K90 days

650.8K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on6.7K r2u288 autocran37K conda_forge909 bioconda285 c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ dnychka/fieldsrpackage

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 2026-07-19.

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)

R >= 4.0.0methodsspam viridisLite RColorBrewer

Imports (1)

maps

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (1)

mapproj

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

235direct

99indirect

and 187 more packages.

Code & Tests

Code Composition

R 23,219 (51%)Rd 16,854 (37%)Other 2,623 (6%)Fortran 1,953 (4%)C 513 (1%)

Code characteristics

Object systems

S350

Cyclomatic complexity: 4.0 median / 39 max
Test cases: 1 / 0.41 per code line

Test coverage

Line coverage

49%

Expression

47.7%

Tests / Examples

48.9% / 63% ex

Functions

310 0 exported

Complexity

5.8 avg / 39 max

Call network

310 nodes / 348 edges

Call graph

Open call graph →

Loading call graph…

Lowest coverage

310 functions

Function	Cyclo	Coverage
Exp.earth.cov	2	0%
Exp.image.cov	5	0%
Exp.simple.cov	6	0%
Krig.updateY	6	0%
Matern.cor.to.range	4	0%
Paciorek.cov	11	0%

Datasets

Bundled datasets · 24

Name	Class	Rows × Cols	Also ships in
CO.elev	vector	–	–
CO.id	vector	–	–
CO.loc	data.frame	376 × 2	–
CO.names	vector	–	–
CO.ppt.MAM.climate	vector	–	–
CO.tmax.MAM.climate	vector	–	–
CO.tmean.MAM.climate	vector	–	–
CO.tmin.MAM.climate	vector	–	–
CO.years	vector	–	–
blasterBlue	vector	–	–
coloradoRed	vector	–	–
darkBlue	vector	–	–
darkGray	vector	–	–
earthBlue	vector	–	–
energyYellow	vector	–	–
envrGreen	vector	–	–
goldenTech	vector	–	–
lightBlue	vector	–	–
lightGray	vector	–	–
mutedBlue	vector	–	–
paleBlue	vector	–	–
rat.diet	data.frame	39 × 3	–
redFlannel	vector	–	–
silver	vector	–	–

People & History

People (7)

Maintainer (1)

Douglas Nychka

Author, Maintainer · added in 2.7.0

Authors (7)

Douglas Nychka

Author, Maintainer · added in 2.7.0

Reinhard Furrer

Author · added in 2.7.0

Florian Gerber

Author · added in 9.9

Matthew Iverson

Author · added in 9.9

Rider Johnson

Author · added in 16.2

John Paige

Author · added in 8.3-5

Stephan Sain

Author · added in 3.0.3

Listed in earlier versions (3)

Doug Nychka

no longer listed · 1.0 to 4.1

Stephen Sain

no longer listed · 2.7.0 to 6.8

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

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.

17.3Latest
2026-05-05 · current release · diff ↗
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R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
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R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
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R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18

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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

Analysis of Spatial Data

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