The rgdal package provides bindings to the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) and access to projection and transformation operations from the PROJ library. This software is the workhorse for many spatial software applications and many spatial data analysis packages build upon it. Its bindings allow fast I/O (input/output) operations for GDAL-supported raster formats and OGR-supported vector formats as well as numerous utility functions to convert geographic longitude and latitude coordinates into Cartesian coordinates (and vice versa).