Convert a list of sf objects into one sf

This is an old question but it is worth to note that the recent version of dplyr (> 0.9) can bind rows of sf objects (in a list or not):

single_sf <- dplyr::bind_rows(my_list)
class(single_sf)
[1] "sf"         "data.frame"

Other packages also provide options that can be used for binding sf objects (e.g. mapedit:::combine_list_of_sf(), sf:::rbind.sf and data.table::rbindlist), besides the do.call() option mentioned above (see https://github.com/r-spatial/sf/issues/798# for a discussion and some benchmarking). But the dplyr option also works for sf objects with data frames containing different number of columns, somenthing that do.call(), sf:::rbind.sf(), and data.table::rbindlist() cannot do, and was important for me working with a list of sf objects with different number of columns.

df <- do.call(rbind, my_list)

> class(df)
[1] "sf"         "data.frame"

It is worth noting that dplyr::bind_rows and purrr::map_dfr does not work with sf objects, and thus rbind is better in this case.

I've found the fastest approach to do this is using data.table::rbindlist and then converting back to sf, as follows:

library(sf)
library(data.table)

# fast row bind
sf <- rbindlist(my_list)

# back to st
sf <- st_sf(sf)