Merging multiple rasters in R

Question

I\'ve been trying to find a time-efficient way to merge multiple raster images in R. These are adjacent ASTER scenes from the southern Kilimanjaro region, and my target is to pu

Answer 1

I have tested the solution using gdalUtils as proposed by Matthew Bayly. It works quite well and fast (I have about 1000 images to merge). However, after checking with document of mosaic_raster function here, I found that it works without making a template raster before mosaic the images. I pasted the example codes from the document below:

outdir <- tempdir()
gdal_setInstallation()
valid_install <- !is.null(getOption("gdalUtils_gdalPath"))
if(require(raster) && require(rgdal) && valid_install)
{
layer1 <- system.file("external/tahoe_lidar_bareearth.tif", package="gdalUtils")
layer2 <- system.file("external/tahoe_lidar_highesthit.tif", package="gdalUtils")
mosaic_rasters(gdalfile=c(layer1,layer2),dst_dataset=file.path(outdir,"test_mosaic.envi"),
    separate=TRUE,of="ENVI",verbose=TRUE)
gdalinfo("test_mosaic.envi")

}