Hello, I just want to send a general note of encouragement to R folks to engage more closely with the GDAL development project.
GDAL is used heavily in terra and sf and vapour and gdalcubes. It provides read and write access to many many file and url and database formats, amongst many other facilities. Sometimes, there are features in R that can be made redundant because of changes in GDAL, an example is this file mentioned in the related github issue: If you've got useful information about files that could be used to improve GDAL, please share it on the gdal-dev mailing list, or as bug reports on the GDAL issues on github. If you need assistance or aren't sure I'm very happy to help too. Here's two examples. 1) In R, terra knows this file is longitude/latitude because it has internal heuristics (the data projection metadata is not set, but the data lives with longitudes -180, 360 and latitudes -90, 90 (or near enough): terra::crs(terra::rast("NetCDF:oisst-avhrr-v02r01.20220218.nc:sst")) [1] "GEOGCRS[\"WGS 84 (CRS84)\",\n DATUM[\"World G In sf and stars, it's not known because sf is more faithful to what GDAL provides (this file is non compliant to whatever convention, it's a very common situation because some domains assume "longlat" is just obvious). sf::gdal_read("NetCDF:oisst-avhrr-v02r01.20220218.nc:sst", read_data = F)$crs Coordinate Reference System: NA In GDAL 3.7.0 when that rolls out across R, both sf and terra will get the same valid crs information from GDAL if the option GDAL_NETCDF_ASSUME_LONGLAT=YES is set. 2) GRIB is a wild and wonderful format, and when it uses map projections sometimes the metadata is completely screwed up - for too long I worked around this in R, but a simple bug report on thegithub issues saves a whole of of pain and extra code on the R side: https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/7298 These examples represent one of many tiny details that users encounter in many places. Please take the time to report these issues to GDAL, sometimes effort that goes into downstream packages on CRAN won't make it further up the chain, which is a shame - because, it might be fixed in R, but if it were fixed in GDAL it'll also be fixed in Python, QGIS, and many other applications. There are many ways to contribute beyond simply sharing files and output of course, improving the documentation, fixing bugs - if you're interested in this and want to discuss I'm also happy to help. The file I used in the example above is posted in the related GDAL PR (pull request): https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/6195 All the best! Mike -- Michael Sumner Software and Database Engineer Australian Antarctic Division Hobart, Australia e-mail: mdsum...@gmail.com [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo