NEWS

geobounds 1.0.0 (2026-07-08)

Changed the package software license from CC BY 4.0 to MIT and clarified that downloaded boundaries and included figures retain the licenses and attribution requirements of geoBoundaries and their original sources. Documentation now distinguishes the varying gbOpen licenses, UN OCHA terms and the non-commercial restriction on UN SALB boundaries. Downloads from gbAuthoritative now display a licensing notice.

Improved documentation and user-facing messages to align terminology across roxygen2 and narrative documentation and clarify package output.

First CRAN release.

Functions for downloading boundaries have been renamed to follow the convention object_verb() (see https://devguide.ropensci.org/pkg_building.html):

get_gb() -> gb_get().
?get_gb_adm family -> ?gb_get_adm family.
get_gb_cgaz() -> gb_get_world(). gb_get_cgaz() is also available for backward compatibility as an alias of gb_get_world().
get_gb_meta() -> gb_get_metadata().

Additionally, the metadata argument has been removed. Use gb_get_metadata() instead.

Added a DOI.
All download functions now use .zip archives containing .shp files instead of .geojson or .gpkg files, removing the geojsonsf dependency from Imports.
All download functions now return MULTIPOLYGON geometries.
All download functions now return NULL without an error or warning when a country file is unavailable.
All download functions now retry transient request failures with httr2::req_retry().
Cached files from previous package versions are no longer reused because the source archive format changed.
Country matching now improves detection for Antarctica and Kosovo.
gb_get*() functions now allow mixed country argument types, such as gb_get(country = c("Germany", "USA")).
gb_get_adm5() was added.
gb_get_max_adm_lvl() was added.
gb_get_world() now retrieves the latest boundaries available from the repository at https://github.com/wmgeolab/geoBoundaries/tree/main/releaseData.