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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

countryatlas 2.0.0

A major release that wires countryatlas into the database-rendering world via ‘ggsql’, widens the map vocabulary, and fixes several correctness issues found by auditing 1.0.0. The version is bumped to 2.0.0 because the bug fixes change the output of world_map() (quantile binning), bubble_map() / flow_map() (de-duplicated symbols), geom_country_labels() (label placement) and convert_country() (override-only entities) — code that depended on the old behaviour may see different maps or values.

New: database-side rendering with ggsql

  • as_ggsql_source() exports a curated, ISO-reconciled, WDI-joined table (with sf geometry WKB-encoded) as a ggsql source — a DuckDB connection, a Parquet file, or a nanoarrow stream. countryatlas does the reconciliation ggsql’s static bundled world can’t; ggsql does the database push-down and Vega-Lite output countryatlas doesn’t.
  • world_query() emits a ggsql spatial query (VISUALISE … DRAW spatial PROJECT TO … SCALE … LABEL …) — a dependency-free string builder.
  • interactive_map(engine = "ggsql") registers the data and renders the map in DuckDB, returning a Vega-Lite widget.
  • ggsql, duckdb, DBI and nanoarrow are optional Suggests. See the new countryatlas and ggsql vignette.

New: maps, projections and helpers

New: historical entities, inequality and spatial statistics

  • historical_codes — a curated, dated crosswalk of dissolved entities (Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Netherlands Antilles, North/South Yemen, pre-2011 Sudan, United Arab Republic, Tanganyika/Zanzibar, North/South Vietnam, Serbia and Montenegro) to their successor states, with retired ISO codes where they existed. Kosovo is included among the Yugoslav successors on a territory basis (documented).
  • dissolve_country() — resolve a mixed vector of historical and modern names to successor iso3c rows (one-to-many, dated); modern names pass through as single rows, so a whole messy column pipes in unchanged.
  • check_country_match() gains a historical column. It flags dissolved entities even when countrycode “matches” them — the headline case is "USSR", which countrycode silently resolves to Russia’s RUS, so Soviet-era data becomes Russian data with no warning.
  • correlate_indicators() — pairwise indicator correlations on the spine (pearson/spearman, pairwise-complete, per-pair n), tidy long output.
  • beta_convergence() / sigma_convergence() — the two standard convergence diagnostics: the growth-on-initial-level regression (with implied convergence speed and half-life) and per-year cross-country dispersion.
  • gini() and theil() — inequality across countries, population-weightable; theil() decomposes exactly into between/within components when a grouping (continent, income) is supplied.
  • lag_by_country() / diff_by_country() — panel lag and difference grouped by iso3c and ordered by year, completing the panel toolkit around growth_rate() / index_to() / complete_years().
  • morans_i() — global Moran’s I with a permutation pseudo-p-value, computed on the row-standardised country_borders() adjacency. No spdep dependency: the weights come from the package’s own curated topology.
  • spike_map() — triangular spikes at country centroids (height ∝ value), the overplotting-resistant cousin of bubble_map(); needs only maps.
  • convert_country() accepts to = "name_<lang>" ("name_fr", "name_es", "name_zh", …) for localized country names via countrycode’s CLDR tables.
  • world_map(style = "binned") legends now show SI-formatted breaks (4M, not 4e+06) when scales is installed; the continuous scale uses the same formatter.

Bug fixes

  • country_join() / country_join_all() no longer cross-join rows whose iso3c is NA: unmatched countries used to collapse to a single NA key and fan out into a Cartesian product. The joins now pass na_matches = "never" (#4).
  • country_join_all() validates the length of origin (must be 1 or one per table) instead of failing with a cryptic “missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed” error (#16).
  • join_world()’s auto-detection (detect_country_col()) honours the candidate priority order instead of picking the first column by data-frame position, so a region column no longer shadows a real country column (#6).
  • standardize_country(add = ...) accepts any raw countrycode destination (e.g. "iso3n") again instead of erroring with “subscript out of bounds” (#5).
  • standardize_country(origin = "iso3c") now validates codes: strings that are not real ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes become NA (and are flagged by warn) rather than passing through uppercased and unchecked (#12).
  • country_data(latest = TRUE) / world_data(latest = TRUE) for a single year now returns each country’s most recent non-NA value: the fetch window is widened so an earlier observation can actually be found (#7).
  • fetch_wdi() keeps iso2c / country for a country that appears only in a non-first indicator (they are coalesced across indicators) instead of leaving them NA (#8).
  • world_map() / globe_map() with style = "quantile" / "jenks" no longer error on a constant, single-country, or all-NA value column; degenerate breaks now fall back to a single bin (#9).
  • flow_map() returns the base map (instead of erroring) when no origin-destination pair resolves to a centroid (#10).
  • aggregate_regions(fun = "min"/"max") returns NA for an all-NA group instead of Inf / -Inf (#11).
  • share_of_world() returns NA (not NaN/Inf) when the (per-year) total is zero or non-finite (#13).
  • gini() returns NA with a warning for negative input rather than a value outside the documented [0, 1] range (#14).
  • spike_map() no longer produces NaN spike coordinates when every height is zero (#15).
  • world_query() honours transform even when palette = NULL, emitting a standalone SCALE fill VIA <transform> clause (#17).
  • world_map(style = "quantile"/"jenks") computed breaks over polygon vertices, so a country’s geometric complexity biased the quantiles and the bins held unequal numbers of countries. Breaks are now computed on one value per country.
  • bubble_map(backend = "sf") placed bubbles in projected metres on a degrees base map (off the map). The base map and bubbles now share one projected CRS via coord_sf().
  • Polygon centroids returned more than one row for ten iso3c codes (overrides map several names — Azores/Madeira → PRT — to one code), fanning out joins in bubble_map() / flow_map(). Centroids are now one antimeridian-safe row per country (the largest piece).
  • geom_country_labels() placed labels at the bounding-box midpoint over all of a country’s pieces, so the US / Fiji / NZ labels drifted into the wrong ocean. Labels now sit on each country’s largest piece.
  • projection = "plate_carree" built an incoherent PROJ string (+proj=longlat … +units=m); it is now true equirectangular (+proj=eqc).
  • convert_country() only applied wdj_overrides() for to = "iso3c", so override-only entities (e.g. “Canary Islands”, “Azores”, “Bonaire”) returned NA for every other destination (continent, region, iso2c, flag, currency, country name, …). It now resolves the override-corrected iso3c first and derives every other destination from that.
  • Kosovo’s XKX needed extra care: it has no row at all in countrycode::codelist, so deriving destinations purely via the iso3c round-trip above is NA for everything — which would have regressed flag/region/country, since 1.0.0 already resolved those via direct name matching (verified against the actual 1.0.0 code). convert_country() now recovers from the original name when the iso3c round-trip comes back empty, and fills iso2c/continent (which neither path classifies) from the same curated fallback standardize_country() uses. Net effect versus 1.0.0: zero regressions, plus newly-working continent/iso2c for Kosovo — which also fixes locate_country(..., add = "continent") for points inside it.
  • interactive_map(..., tooltip = ) was accepted but silently ignored by every engine (pre-dating 2.0.0). The "ggiraph" and "leaflet" engines now use the supplied tooltip column, defaulting to fill as before when omitted.
  • world_data(overrides = ) (and attach_geometry(overrides = )) accepted a custom name -> iso3c override set but silently ignored it (pre-dating 2.0.0) – the geometry backend always matched with the default wdj_overrides(). The override set now flows through to both the polygon and sf matchers, so a custom mapping actually changes which polygons a country claims.
  • repair_country_names() no longer records a no-op “repair” when a dissolved entity’s own name (e.g. “Yugoslavia”, which exists in the codelist but has no ISO code) comes back as its closest suggestion; dissolve_country() is the right tool there and is what the report now points to.

Housekeeping

  • New hex logo, drawn by the package itself (data-raw/hex_logo.R): an orthographic globe — globe_map()’s projection — carrying a viridis choropleth of world_snapshot GDP per capita on Natural Earth geometry joined by attach_geometry(), with spike_map()-style population spikes rising off the horizon and the binned-legend swatches under the wordmark.
  • The gdp_per_capita_2015 compatibility alias (a one-cycle deprecation shim from 1.0.0) is now opt-in: set options(countryatlas.gdp_compat = TRUE) to restore it. The default is FALSE, so world_data() no longer emits a duplicate column.
  • world_snapshot refreshed to year 2024 (was 2022) and rebuilt with the latest WDI data and curated overrides.
  • country_groups_tbl membership date bumped to 2026-06-01 (was 2024-01-01).
  • ?world_snapshot was out of sync with the rebuilt data (missing the “Snapshot year: 2024” note); regenerated.
  • Fixed a stray orphaned code fence at the end of the countryatlas and ggsql vignette that broke its markdown structure.
  • README and vignettes now demonstrate every exported function: wdi_search(), country_codes(), complete_years(), growth_rate() / index_to(), repair_country_names(), country_join_all(), locate_country() and facet_map() gained worked examples, and the vignettes prefer country_overrides() over the soft-deprecated wdj_overrides(). The README’s rendered output and figures were stale (pre-dating the quantile-breaks fix and the gdp_per_capita_2015 opt-in) and have been re-rendered from the 2.0.0 code.

countryatlas 1.0.0

CRAN release: 2026-06-24

A single, comprehensive release that takes the package from a one-function proof of concept to a complete toolkit for joining world data to maps. The spirit is unchanged — ISO codes as the universal join key, one call to a map-ready table — but pushed to its full potential.

Breaking-ish changes

  • world_data() is generalised but backward-compatible: world_data(2020) still returns the classic polygon-backed, GDP-per-capita tibble. The only visible change is the column name gdp_per_capita_2015 → gdp_per_capita. A one-cycle deprecation shim keeps gdp_per_capita_2015 available as an alias (toggle with options(countryatlas.gdp_compat = FALSE)).
  • The 16 regions the previous version silently dropped (Kosovo, Micronesia, the Virgin Islands, Saint Martin, Bonaire/Saba/Sint Eustatius, the Canary Islands, Madeira/Azores, …) are now matched via [wdj_overrides()] instead of deleted, so they appear on maps. Diffs of map output will show increased coverage.

New: core data assembly

  • world_data() gains indicator (one or many WDI codes; named vectors drive clean column names), multi-year panels, an sf backend (geometry = "sf"), region subsetting, latest, projections and caching.
  • country_data() — the lightweight, one-row-per-country analysis table.
  • world_geometry() — projected, region-subset geometry (countries, centroids, coastline, borders, graticule, ocean).

New: the join engine (exposed for your data)

New: diagnostics

New: reference data & translation

New: analysis helpers

New: visualization

Performance & offline

  • WDI fetches are memoised with an optional on-disk cache; multiple indicators are fetched in parallel (parallel::mclapply) where supported. See clear_wdi_cache().
  • The bundled world_snapshot lets every example, test and vignette run offline and deterministically.

Engineering

  • Namespace hygiene (targeted @importFrom instead of blanket @import).
  • Input validation with friendly cli / rlang errors.
  • A testthat (3e) suite; network calls are skipped offline and on CRAN.
  • Vignettes and a pkgdown site.
  • Refreshed CI: R-CMD-check, test-coverage and pkgdown workflows.
  • Heavy spatial dependencies (sf, rnaturalearth, cartogram, biscale, geofacet, gganimate, leaflet, …) are all in Suggests and gated by rlang::check_installed(), so the base install stays light.

Group memberships in country_groups_tbl are point-in-time as of 2024-01-01.

countryatlas 0.1.0

  • Initial experimental release with a single world_data(year) function.