Tomorrow is the extended deadline for useR! 2026 submissions. I'd like to encourage those with ideas that could benefit from discussion in Warsaw in early July at useR! to join in.
Specifically, I am considering submitting a talk/lightning talk/poster on the imminent confusion that will hit us when NAD83 is replaced by modernized NSRS (see ia. https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/datums/newdatums/index.shtml, https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcuser/moving-from-static-spatial-reference-systems-in-2022) in North America, and the ETRS89 standard being considered as a datum ensemble in Europe (see ia. https://evrs.bkg.bund.de/Subsites/EVRS/EN/Results_and_Products/NationalRealizationsETRS89/national_realization.html). This hit PROJ with the updated EPSG database released with PROJ 9.8.0 (thread starting https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/proj/2026-March/012026.html).
The changes are going to affect all geospatial software relying on position whether we like it ot not, even if the changes are single-digit metres or less. So affecting anything linking to GDAL/PROJ, and packages using terra, sf, gdalraster, vapour, gdalcubes.
I would like to ask for help in submitting (by tomorrow evening 14 March) and for some input to a "task force" to try to prepare for oncoming changes. Please rely on-list or directly by email - I have set up a github repo https://github.com/rsbivand/new_ref_systems, so issues can also be used by github users. Please tell me not to worry and drop this concern, or consider helping to see how to move forward, including talking about this at useR!.
Hoping for contributions,
Roger
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Roger Bivand
Emeritus Professor
Norwegian School of Economics
Postboks 3490 Ytre Sandviken, 5045 Bergen, Norway
Roger.Bivand at nhh.no