abind Error when converting a .tif raster data object to an sf object using st_as_sf() in R

Question

When I try to convert a .tif raster data object to an sf object using st_as_sf() in R, I get the following error:

Error in abind(x, along = length(dim(x)) + 1) : along must be between 0 and 2

Does anyone know how to solve this?

The .tif data for which to reproduce this I got from https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/gpw-v4-data-quality-indicators-rev11/data-download.

The error occurs both for the Data Context and Mean Administrative Unit Area data. Choose GeoTiff and 30 sec (1 km) resolution.

The reprex R code is then (for the Data Context data, for example):

library(stars)

# Load data
gpw_raw <- read_stars("gpw_v4_data_quality_indicators_rev11_context_30_sec.tif")

# Attemt to convert .tif into sf object
gpw <- st_as_sf(gpw_raw)

One resource I used, which in the end did not allow me to solve the issue, is: https://r-spatial.github.io/stars/articles/stars5.html#vectorizing-a-raster-object-to-an-sf-object

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

st_as_sf fails if the stars object is a "proxy" object. I've downloaded the smaller 30 minute dataset to demonstrate.

Read in as a proxy object and it fails:

> gpw_raw <- read_stars("gpw_v4_data_quality_indicators_rev11_context_30_min.tif", proxy=TRUE)
> gpw <- st_as_sf(gpw_raw)
Error in abind(x, along = length(dim(x)) + 1) : 
  along must be between 0 and 2

Read in not as a proxy object and it works:

> gpw_raw <- read_stars("gpw_v4_data_quality_indicators_rev11_context_30_min.tif", proxy=FALSE)
> gpw <- st_as_sf(gpw_raw)
> 

This is because somewhere in st_as_sf it is expecting to find the data, but instead a proxy object only has a pointer to the data, reading it on demand, but it seems st_as_sf isn't demanding enough. Possibly a bug in the st_as_sf function, report to the stars package: https://github.com/r-spatial/stars/issues/ issue tracker if you want.

I tried this with the 30 second data but that is 43200 x 21600 cells which means nearly a billion polygons when converted using st_as_sf. If you've got the RAM for that then fine, read it in with proxy=FALSE and it should work. Otherwise, find another way to deal with this data.