NEWS

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spatcovar 0.1.0 (2026-09-08)

Initial release of spatcovar, an R package providing a consistent, pipeable interface for constructing commonly used spatial covariates directly on sf polygon data frames.

Core Functions

• spat_area(): Calculates polygon geometric areas with conversion across metric and customary area units ("m2", "km2", "ha", "mi2"). Uses geodesic measurement on geographic coordinate reference systems (via sf/s2) and planar measurement on projected systems.
• spat_distance(): Computes shortest geometry-to-geometry ("minimum"), centroid-to-feature ("centroid"), or interior point-on-surface ("point_on_surface") distances from target polygons to reference features. Employs indexed nearest-feature search to avoid computing full pairwise distance matrices. Supports output in "m", "km", and "mi".
• spat_count(): Counts source points, lines, or polygons intersecting each target polygon using explicit topological intersection semantics (including boundary-touching features). Multi-geometry features count as single source features.
• spat_length(): Clips line features to polygon boundaries and measures total linework length per polygon. Explicitly handles native linear units of the projected coordinate reference system before converting to the requested unit ("m", "km", "mi").
• spat_overlap(): Evaluates spatial overlap between target and source polygon layers, returning total overlap area (measure = "area"), coverage fraction relative to target area (measure = "share"), or intersecting polygon counts (measure = "count"). Issues an informative warning when source polygons have positive-area duplicate coverage among themselves.
• spat_raster(): Computes coverage-fraction-weighted zonal summary statistics ("mean", "median", "min", "max", "sum", "count", "stdev") from single-layer raster grids using the exactextractr engine. Preserves valid zero values and returns NA across all requested statistics when a polygon has zero valid non-NA raster cell support.
• spat_diagnostics(): Retrieves structured operation metadata attached when diagnostics = TRUE is passed to any core function.

Synthetic Example Datasets

• Provides five lightweight, self-contained synthetic fixtures in EPSG:32632 for examples, testing, and reproducible workflows without external file dependencies: example_polygons(), example_points(), example_lines(), example_grid(), and example_raster().

Design Guarantees & Semantics

• Row and Geometry Preservation: Output data frames retain the exact row count, row order, and original geometry of the input target polygons.
• Safe Geometry Repair: Invalid geometries are repaired on internal copies used for computation (repair = TRUE by default); the geometry column returned to the user is never altered.
• Coordinate Reference System Policy: Enforces strict validation requiring known coordinate reference systems on all vector and raster inputs. spat_length() strictly requires a projected (planar) CRS.
• Dynamic Output Column Naming: Derives deterministic, unit-aware column names by default (e.g. area_km2, dist_m, length_km, overlap_share), with user override via the name argument.
• Collision Protection: Prevents accidental overwriting of existing data frame columns unless explicitly allowed with overwrite = TRUE.