vect() now silently assigns a CRS to some data frames

[AMBarbosa]

Hi,

According to ?vect, the crs argument should be empty by default, and it used to be. But now, in some cases a CRS is automatically assigned to non-spatial inputs (e.g. data frames), without any message or warning:

fer <- geodata::sp_occurrence("Alytes", "muletensis")

class(fer)
# "data.frame"

fer_sv <- terra::vect(fer)

crs(fer_sv, proj = TRUE)
# "+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 +no_defs" -- where did this come from?


quakes <- read.csv("https://data.humdata.org/dataset/4881d82b-ba63-4515-b748-c364f3d05b42/resource/10ac8776-5141-494b-b3cd-bf7764b2f964/download/earthquakes1970-2014.csv")

quakes_sv <- terra::vect(quakes)

crs(quakes_sv)
# ""

Is this desired? In any case, I think it's not documented, and it would grant at least a message in the console output. The user may not wish (and not expect) for the SpatVector to get a CRS, and WGS84 may not be the right datum for all lon-lat coordinates.

Cheers,

[rhijmans]

This is now documented. You can now also get a warning when the values for "geom" or "crs" are guessed and with "quiet=FALSE".

I appreciate that not all lonlat is WGS84 but, I suspect that in these rare cases, and the user is aware of that, they will provide the correct value if they can figure out how to do that.