Chris Toney

Union of Concerned Scientists

The administration plan to slash the US Forest Service offices and relocate and consolidate its research and development facilities would also potentially abandon generational investments in critical forestry data, samples, and resources. This would leave land managers, firefighters, and decision makers without the crucial information they need to manage climate risks and protect US forests from wildfires growing in frequency and intensity.

https://blog.ucs.org/mrama-poccia/ask-a-scientist-how-do-we-save-us-forest-service-from-president-trumps-restructuring/

RE: @mtpr@flipboard.com

Apparently my neighborhood is "geographically confused" 🙂

"If you've lived there long enough, you've probably heard sensational tales of strife and betrayal surrounding the origin of the Garden City’s most geographically confused neighborhood. We're here to set the record straight. It’s the saga of the Slant Streets... Some versions of this legend even have rumors of infidelity in the mix, Nick."

Excellent reporting by William Brangham on PBS NewsHour today.

"And what we understand about fire behavior and fire risk is front and center. To even start to lose ground on what we're learning on that would be a significant, immediate loss. This is long-term stuff. This is stuff that relates to quality of life for not only this generation, but other generation and needs that we have just for basic sustenance of humans."

-Mike Dombeck, Former Chief, U.S. Forest Service

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-forest-service-cuts-raise-concerns-on-protecting-public-lands-and-fighting-wildfires

R package gdalraster has been updated on CRAN. The package provides comprehensive API bindings to GDAL. v2.6.0 is a feature release with full changelog at:

https://firelab.github.io/gdalraster/news/index.html

#rstats #rspatial #gdal

#Rstats psa

rhub::rhub_check()

Canonical/Ubuntu major outage on the same day as Copy Fail seems not great:
"Component 'Ubuntu Security API - CVEs' and a few other components are Down", currently at 14 hours (apparently DDoS).

"a few other components" being Livepatch API, Ubuntu Security API - Notices, canonical.com, launchpad.net, ubuntu.com, and several others.

"the price of jet fuel has skyrocketed since the war in Iran began in late February. Ultimately, taxpayers will be the ones to shell out tens of millions of dollars more to fight summer wildfires this year."

https://www.mtpr.org/2026-04-30/taxpayers-might-pay-millions-more-to-fight-wildfires-as-jet-fuel-skyrockets

@mdsumner I would think situations analogous to the GDAL one are not uncommon in R package dev. It's mainly the context of devtools::install() that I object to (and the sudden change). I set dependencies = FALSE. OK that's package deps not sys reqs, but a big clue to devtools that I don't want to install other stuff. I don't think a dev tool should perform invasive procedures like apt install unless I specifically request it. sysreqs should be arg in pak not env var that must be set, IMO.

"There is a timeless quality to a New England spring (or as timeless as anything can be in an age of rapid climate change), and part of that timelessness is the United States Forest Service, whose land boundaries I wander across most days on rambles through the woods. For more than a century, the Forest Service has been a fairly stable fact of life across vast swaths of the American landscape."

Bill McKibben article in The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-forest-service-a-force-across-rural-america-reorganizes-under-trump

#rspatial not to over-complicate or anything. The specific issue is muparser in RTools. More generally, motivation is an example case for better understanding how R spatial community can provide feedback/support/contribute upstream regarding spatial libs in RTools. If you have advice or suggestions based on previous experience in this area, or other thoughts along those lines, please consider dropping a note in https://github.com/firelab/gdalraster/issues/858.