As for the 2-D, in the past, I’ve used the following steps: I have the point locations (that sites I’m interested in), and then I create a line using a bearing and a distance. The bearing comes from knowing flow direction and the distance usually starts as a multi-scale trial-and-error. Using the derived lines, I extract the contour-following distance, the planar distance, and (using simple trig) I calculate the slope (to correct the planar distance). One application for the BTM would be to calculate the upstream linear rugosity from multiple points and then interpolate those data point for continuous spatial coverage. The resulting map shows a metric of bottom flow turbulence (which I’ve found is very powerful at predicting species distributions and biodiversity).
My question:
I saw that in table 1 of your 2014 paper, and agree BTM would be a good home for it. How would the input data typically be stored? a series of points, or as line segments connecting the locations? I could see making a tool either way, from a GIS perspective, existing line segments are easier to work with, but probably raw data collection happens as (x, y, z) values I imagine.
Original table:
From Cherisse:
My question: