Hi,

I teach a small class on GIS in R and I have been struggling with how to advise my students on whether to use stars or terra when working with raster data. I like stars as it follows a logic similar to that of sf, but I have noticed that the raster package itself appears to be pushing future users towards terra as a replacement of raster (and to a lesser degree for sp instead of sf). I imagine you are not neutral on this question, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about what the future evolution of these two packages will be. Are they both expected to continue parallel independent development? Are they expected to have different niches or simply be alternative ways of doing similar things? Which of the two tools is best for students to learn?

Thanks,
David