to_disk: Logical argument, if FALSE results of get_patches are hold in memory. If true, get_patches writes temporary files and hence, does not hold everything in memory. Can be set with a global option, e.g. options(to_disk = TRUE). See Details.
Returns
Global option to be used internally in the package
Details
Landscape metrics rely on the delineation of patches. Hence, get_patches is heavily used in landscapemetrics . As raster can be quite big, the fact that get_patches creates a copy of the raster for each class in a landscape becomes a burden for computer memory. Hence, the argument to_disk allows to store the results of the connected labeling algorithm on disk. Furthermore, this option can be set globally, so that every function that internally uses get_patches can make use of that.