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ffm

{ffm} is an R package that provides quick and easy access to data from the geodata center of Germany’s Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG). The BKG is the official provider of spatial data in Germany and provides quite a few datasets as open data. These data range from administrative areas to earth observation data and are often crucial when working with regional statistics from Germany. Part of the motivation for this package stems from frustration when working areal identifiers returned by packages like wiesbaden or restatis and not being able to quickly link them to their spatial representations.

The name ffm is based on the colloquial short name of Frankfurt am Main where the BKG’s headquarters are located.

The following examples were created using {ffm}. You can see their code in the examples/ directory.

Installation

You can install the development version of ffm from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("jslth/ffm")

Example

Retrieving data is pretty straightforward:

library(ffm)
districts <- bkg_admin(level = "krs", scale = "5000")
Code for the plot 
library(ggplot2)

ggplot(districts) +
  geom_sf(fill = NA) +
  theme_void()

The package makes it easy to go deeper than just getting the data. In many functions, you can use spatial filters.

districts <- bkg_admin(
  level = "krs",
  scale = "5000",
  bbox = c(xmin = 700000, ymin = 5900000, xmax = 850000, ymax = 6000000),
  predicate = "intersects"
)
districts$label <- ifelse(
  districts$bez == "Kreisfreie Stadt",
  paste("Stadt", districts$gen),
  districts$gen
)
Code for the plot 
library(ggrepel)

ggplot(districts) +
  geom_sf(fill = NA) +
  geom_text_repel(
    aes(label = label, geometry = geometry),
    stat = "sf_coordinates",
    size = 3
  ) +
  theme_void()

Attribute filters are supported using an R-like syntax.

munics <- bkg_admin(
  level = "gem",
  key_date = "1231",
  sn_l %in% c("08", "09")
)
Code for the plot 
munics$popdens <- munics$ewz / munics$kfl
munics$popdens[munics$popdens == 0] <- NA
ggplot(munics) +
  geom_sf(aes(fill = popdens), color = NA) +
  scale_fill_viridis_b("Population / km²", transform = "log10") +
  ggtitle("Population density in Southern Germany") +
  theme_void()

Supported products

Function Description BKG products
bkg_admin Administrative boundaries at different spatial scales; includes country, state, government region, district, administrative associations, and municipalities vg250 and related products
bkg_admin_hierarchy Administrative boundaries containing details on their relationship to administrative areas of higher levels in the territorial hierarchy vz250
bkg_admin_highres Administrative boundaries at a significantly lower resolution that provided by bkg_admin() vg25
bkg_ags Geographical names associated with official keys (AGS and ARS) wfs_gnde
bkg_airports International, regional, and special airports in Germany wfs_poi_open
bkg_amr Labor market regions (Arbeitsmarktregionen) ge250 and related products
bkg_area_codes Area code regions (Vorwahlgebiete) wfs_gnde
bkg_ars Geographical names associated with official keys (AGS and ARS) wfs_gnde
bkg_authorities Regions of administrative responsibility for several agencies (Behördenzuständigkeitsbereiche) wfs_bzb_open
bkg_bkr Lignite extraction regions (Braunkohlereviere) ge250 and related products
bkg_clc Land cover areas based on the Corine Land Cover (CLC) nomenclature wfs_clc5
bkg_crossings International border crossings wfs_poi_open
bkg_dem Elevation raster from the digital elevation model (DEM) dgm200
bkg_dlm Topographical objects of a landscape from the Digital Landscape Model (DLM) dlm250 and related products
bkg_endonyms Geographic names as endonyms wfs_gnde
bkg_geonames Geographic name metadata based on National Name Identifiers (NNID) wfs_gnde
bkg_ggr City regions (Großstadtregionen) ge250 and related products
bkg_grid_full INSPIRE-compliant grid geometries (GeoGitter) GeoGitter
bkg_heliports Heliports wfs_poi_open
bkg_kfz Vehicle registration plate regions (KFZ-Kennzeichen) kfz250
bkg_kilometrage Kilometrages of German federal motorways wfs_poi_open
bkg_kmr Metropolitan regions (Metropolregionen) ge250 and related products
bkg_krg District regions (Kreisregionen) ge250 and related products
bkg_mbe BBSR Mittelbereiche ge250 and related products
bkg_mkro Conurbations (Verdichtungsräume) ge250 and related products
bkg_nuts NUTS regions of scale 1 to 3 from the EU territorial division bkg_nuts250 and related products
bkg_quasigeoid German Combined Quasigeoid, the official height reference surface of the German land survey quasigeoid
bkg_rg Travel areas (Reisegebiete) ge250 and related products
bkg_ror Spatial planning regions (Raumordnungsregionen) ge250 and related products
bkg_seaports Seaports to the North and Baltic Sea wfs_poi_open
bkg_stations Public transport stations and stops wfs_poi_open
bkg_trauma_centers Trauma centers wfs_poi_open

Related packages

  • {giscoR} for retrieving EU geodata (also including Germany)
  • {bonn} for retrieving German areal indicators with official identifiers
  • {restatis} and {wiesbaden} for retrieving regional statistics from Germany
  • {z22} for retrieving gridded German census data
  • {rdwd} for retrieving German weather and climate data

Copyright notice

BKG geodata is provided free of charge but remains copyrighted and subject to BKG licensing. They are licensed under the German Open Data license dl-de/by-2-0 and can be used both commercially and non-commercially with attribution.

When incorporating BKG geodata, please include the following attribution. Update the year to match your data acquisition data and keep the links intact.

This is a summary based on the BKG copyright notice

Disclaimer

This package is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected to the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie, BKG) in any way. All references to data, services, or resources provided by the BKG are for informational purposes only.