NEWS.md

rnaturalearth (development version)

• Correctly downloading parks and protected areas (#114)

ne_download(scale = 10, type = "parks_and_protected_lands_line", category = "cultural")
ne_download(scale = 10, type = "parks_and_protected_lands_line", category = "cultural")
ne_download(scale = 10, type = "parks_and_protected_lands_point", category = "cultural")
ne_download(scale = 10, type = "parks_and_protected_lands_scale_rank", category = "cultural")

• rnaturalearth now requires rnaturalearthdata (>= 1.0.0) and rnaturalearthhires (>= 1.0.0).

• correctly returning the filename in ne_download() when setting load = FALSE

ne_download(
  type = "MSR_50M",
  category = "raster",
  scale = 50,
  load = FALSE
)

rnaturalearth 1.0.1

• Do not test functions who rely on rnaturalearthhires because it is not available on CRAN.

rnaturalearth 1.0.0

Breaking changes

This is a breaking changes release that ends support to sp object in favour of more modern interfaces (sf and terra). Although that sp is still available on CRAN, it is no longer being actively developed (https://geocompx.org/post/2023/rgdal-retirement/). This is the main reason that motivated the choice to transition toward sf (the default) and terra.

Users can choose either get an sf or SpatVector using the returnclass argument:

ne_countries(returnclass = "sf")
ne_countries(returnclass = "sv")

Affected functions are ne_countries(), ne_coastline(), ne_states(), ne_load() and ne_download().

If changing the return type to sf creates too many problems to your existing code, you can still convert it back to sp :

countries <- ne_countries(returnclass = "sf")

# option 1
sf::as_Spatial(countries)


# option 2
as(countries, "Spatial")

More information about the retirement of rgdal, rgeos and maptools: https://r-spatial.org/r/2022/04/12/evolution.html

Bugfix

• Correctly downloading and reading raster object (#96, closes #52).

rnaturalearth 0.3.4

• This is a maintenance release that document/use the new special sentinel "_PACKAGE".

rnaturalearth 0.3.3

• Using lifecycle to indicate that support of sp object will be eventually dropped. Users should now use ne_download(returnclass = "sf"), instead of ne_download(returnclass = "sp").

• terra is now included in the Imports section.

rnaturalearth 0.3.2

• Added new maintainer and contributors (#62).

• Using terra over raster (#63)

  • See https://r-spatial.org/r/2022/04/12/evolution.html#packages-depending-on-sp-and-raster and https://r-spatial.org/r/2022/12/14/evolution2.html#deprecations-in-retiring-packages

• Fixes broken data download links.

  • Now using Amazon hosted URLs as the primary source for downloading data (#48, #64).

rnaturalearth 0.3.0 2021-10-11

• fix rnaturalearthhires installation #47 thank you Ian Taylor for #43

rnaturalearth 0.2.0

• add to river options in ne_download() by adding to data_list_physical.csv fixing #23
• update data to new version Natural Earth v4.1 released May 2018.

rnaturalearth 0.1.0 CRAN

• Initial release
• sf support