Download Official Spatial Data from Germany

Provides quick and easy access to official spatial data from Germany’s Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) < https://gdz.bkg.bund.de/>. Interfaces various web feature services (WFS) and download servers. Allows retrieval, caching and filtering with a wide range of open geodata products, including administrative or non-administrative boundaries, land cover, elevation models, geographic names, and points of interest covering Germany. Can be particularly useful for linking regional statistics to their spatial representations and streamlining workflows that involve spatial data of Germany.

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.

Gallery

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")

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
)

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")
)

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

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.

• If data modified: © BKG (date of last access) dl-de/by-2-0 (data edited)
• If not modified: © BKG (date of last access) dl-de/by-2-0

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.