Guest Lecturer

  • Paul Wetzel, Curriculum & Research Administrator, CEEDS

Learning Goal

  • To use spatial data to make informative maps in R
  • To use spatial data to inform recommendations for policy changes

Mini-Project

Smith maintains the Ada & Archibald MacLeish Field Station, a 240-acre patchwork of forest and farmland located in West Whately, MA that provides opportunities for faculty and students to pursue environmental research, outdoor education, and low-impact recreation. CEEDS would like your help with several projects concerning the field station.

Please choose a topic from the following list illuminated by Paul Wetzel:

  1. MacLeish has approximately four miles of built trail for use by field station visitors. We would like to be able to classify these trails as “Easy,” “Moderate,” or “Difficult” based on their length and change in elevation. Use the spatial data to develop a heuristic that will classify these (or any other) trails based on their difficulty. You might want to consult existing trail rating systems. It would be cool if you could create elevation profiles (e.g., this one). Be sure to consult the extended example in MDSR, which walks you through creating an elevation map for one trail. This map has some noted weaknesses. Your goal should be to improve on it and/or make similar maps for all trails.
    Supporting data includes:
    • Existing trails layer (trails)
    • 30’ contour elevation data (elevation)
    • 3 meter contours can be retrieved from MassGIS (see help("mass_gis"))
    • Property boundary shapefile (boundary)
  2. MacLeish has approximately four miles of built trail, and we would like to develop an addition 1–2 miles of trail for use by field station visitors. We would like to create trails that optimize visitors’ chances of experiencing the diverse landscape of the field station and that make sense and work well with the existing field station trails. Propose an additional 1–2 miles of trail that take advantage of the field station resources. The trails must not exceed 10% slope for any distance over 50’ and must not ever exceed 15% slope.
    Supporting data includes:
    • Existing trails layer (trails)
    • 30’ contour elevation data (elevation)
    • vegetation type layer (forests)
    • hydrology (streams, wetlands, etc.) layers (wetlands, streams)
    • Property boundary layer (boundary)
  3. MacLeish currently has two campsites: one large group site closer to the building and one remote campsite with two tent platforms about one mile from the parking area. We would like to develop one additional campsite that is approximately half a mile walk from the parking area, within 200’ of a stream or other source of water, in forest that is unlike the forest in the two other campsites, relatively flat, and at least 500’ from any research area or any element of the Challenge Course. Propose two new campsite locations for our consideration. It would be ideal if you could verify the viability of your site by actually visiting it (and maybe taking some photographs!).
    Supporting data includes:
    • Existing trails layer (trails)
    • 30’ contour elevation data (elevation)
    • vegetation type layer (forests)
    • hydrology (streams, wetlands, etc.) layers (wetlands, streams)
    • Property boundary layer (boundary)
    • Research locations layer (research)
    • Challenge course element locations layer (challenge_courses)
  4. Biking from Smith College to MacLeish is of interest to a subset of field station visitors. Considering that some bikers appreciate climbing hills and others wish to avoid hills, propose two alternative bike routes to the field station using the available data from MassGIS. Detail the lengths of the routes and the elevation change along the routes, and support your choices with data. It would be cool if you could create elevation profiles (e.g., this one) for each bike route.
    Supporting data includes:
    • Road shapefiles (retrieve from MassGIS)
    • 30’ contour elevation data (elevation)
    • Property boundary layer (boundary)
  5. Field archery is the format of modern archery that takes place on a multi-target course (often compared to a golf course) set out over all kinds of terrain including fields, woods and forests. Field archery is not shot over flat land, but includes up and down and cross-slopes, unmarked distance targets and challenges of light, dark and shadow. These additional aspects require skills known as “fieldcraft”. At MacLeish we are interested in creating a course that is both challenging and safe. Using an existing trail as its basis, the target sites must be backed by a hillside for safety. Passing non-course users must be protected by stray arrows from the existing terrain. We expect the course to have 4 to 5 targets within a designated area.
    Supporting data includes:
    • Existing trails layer (trails)
    • 30’ contour elevation data (elevation)
    • vegetation type layer (forests)
    • hydrology (streams, wetlands, etc.) layers (wetlands, streams)
    • Property boundary layer (boundary)
    • Challenge course element locations layer (challenge_courses)

Data

Data are available through the macleish package for R. The CRAN version is available in the usual way, and is version 0.3.6. Make sure you have version 0.3.6.

# to get CRAN version
install.packages("macleish")
 
# to get latest version
# remotes::install_github("beanumber/macleish")

Some additional points of interest:

library(tidyverse)
library(sf)
points_of_interest <- tribble(
  ~name, ~lat, ~long,
  "Group Campsite", 42.450976, -72.678154, 
  "Remote campsite", 42.458549, -72.679581,
  "Parking", 42.448013, -72.680663,
  "Weather Station OrchardMet", 42.449653, -72.680315,
  "Weather Station WhatelyMet", 42.448470, -72.680553
) %>%
  st_as_sf(coords = c("long", "lat")) %>%
  st_set_crs(4326)

Here is a way to compute the pairwise distance between the points, if they are in order.

points_of_interest %>%
  mutate(
    dist_seq = st_distance(geometry, lag(geometry), by_element = TRUE)
  )
## Simple feature collection with 5 features and 2 fields
## geometry type:  POINT
## dimension:      XY
## bbox:           xmin: -72.68066 ymin: 42.44801 xmax: -72.67815 ymax: 42.45855
## CRS:            EPSG:4326
## # A tibble: 5 x 3
##   name                                   geometry  dist_seq
## * <chr>                               <POINT [°]>       [m]
## 1 Group Campsite             (-72.67815 42.45098)        NA
## 2 Remote campsite            (-72.67958 42.45855)  849.3751
## 3 Parking                    (-72.68066 42.44801) 1173.7405
## 4 Weather Station OrchardMet (-72.68031 42.44965)  184.4102
## 5 Weather Station WhatelyMet (-72.68055 42.44847)  132.8606

Submission

Include a brief write-up (roughly 300–500 words) that summarizes your solution to the problem.

  1. Push all commits to the appropriate repository in our private GitHub organization.
  2. Submit rendered .html file to Moodle

Standards

In this assignment:

  • You should attempt the following standards:

References

citation("macleish")
## 
## To cite package 'macleish' in publications use:
## 
##   Benjamin S. Baumer, Rose Goueth, Wencong Li, Weijia Zhang and
##   Nicholas Horton (NA). macleish: Retrieve Data from MacLeish Field
##   Station. R package version 0.3.6.
##   http://github.com/beanumber/macleish
## 
## A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
## 
##   @Manual{,
##     title = {macleish: Retrieve Data from MacLeish Field Station},
##     author = {Benjamin S. Baumer and Rose Goueth and Wencong Li and Weijia Zhang and Nicholas Horton},
##     note = {R package version 0.3.6},
##     url = {http://github.com/beanumber/macleish},
##   }