mardist - Calculation of Maritime Distances

Tools for calculating and visualizing maritime distances and routes between geographic points. At its core, it implements a fast Haversine formula implemented in data.table to compute great circle distances across sea regions (i.e. avoiding land mass). The package builds a spatial network graph from port and cluster coordinates and uses a shortest path algorithm to identify optimal maritime routes between origin-destination pairs. For visualization, the package exports maps displaying individual routes, multi-destination networks, or continuous routes through specified waypoints. Utility functions identify the nearest network nodes to arbitrary coordinates and handle the antimeridian discontinuities common in Pacific maritime mapping. The package is particularly suited for analyzing shipping lanes, trade routes, and vessel trajectory data.