Get data in R from an ESRI v10 Geodatabase

Question

Does anyone know of a method to get (raster) data out of an ESRI v10 File Geodatabase in R?

ESRI offers a C++ API (for Linux and Windows), so I guess in principle it should be possible for an R package to retrieve (and write) data to a Geodatabase. I could not find any packages capable of doing this though.

Answer 1

Apparently rgdal now supports file geodatabase read access:

library(rgdal)
subset(ogrDrivers(), grepl("GDB", name))
ogrListLayers("/path/to/folder.gdb")

Worked for me on Windows, R v3.2.0, rgdal v0.9-3.

Answer 2

A quick google led me to the following page:

http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_filegdb.html

Which suggest gdal supports file geodatabase. Probably, R then also supports the format through a properly built rgdalpackage. In essence, if the standalone gdal has support, the rgdal package built against that should also read the file geodatabase.