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NCC-CNC / wheretowork

Interactive application for systematic conservation planning
https://NCC-CNC.github.io/wheretowork
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attribute field for NCC_id's #176

Open ricschuster opened 3 years ago

ricschuster commented 3 years ago

Hi Jeff,

JC and I were discussing a potential for an (optional) unique id field getting added to the data schema today. The idea was that NCC would have some form of unique identified that would easily let us id cells across the country for NCC grid systems. This could be a column in the 'attribute data' that's doesn't actually have any functionality in the tool, but can (or will) be exported when downloading solutions.

What do you think about that idea? Would that be something that is fairly straight forward to implement?

jeffreyhanson commented 3 years ago

Hi,

Yeah, I think that should be fairly straightforward. If I understand correctly, we could add a special column to the attribute data (e.g. ncc_grid_id) that, if present, will always be exported with the output Shapefile/Raster stack? Here the app would recognize this special column based on the column name - which could be specified in the app settings?

ricschuster commented 3 years ago

Great!

Yeah, that was the idea. Do you think that's reasonable? JC and I just talked about it today and if you can see a better or more useful way, we are not at all set on the idea we had.

jeffreyhanson commented 3 years ago

Hmm, I think it could potentially be useful for comparing different prioritizations based on the same grid system. But I don't really know if it would provide much functionality that could't be acheived by doing spatial overlaps between different prioritizations.

What do you think people would use the information in this column for? I suppose one downside of having this extra column would be that users could be confused as to why there's an extra column in the output that they didn't specify in the options for downloading results.

ricschuster commented 3 years ago

The idea was that as the WhereToWork tool output gets integrated into the NCC systems the column could be used to fit the result of the optimization back into the NCC grid. Given that its a standardized grid/id system that we can design, we would use this as the unifying factor between input generated from the grid and WhereToWork output.

As its NCC specific it would make the most sense to have this be an optional column. Plus, not all NCC projects would necessarily be at the grid level, but for official NCC business the grid would need to be used.

Does that make sense? I think the extra column could be explained in the tool manual or a version thereof, that is tailored for official NCC business.

jeffreyhanson commented 3 years ago

Ok - yeah - that sounds good. If you wanted to take this a step further, you could look into having multiple nested grids at different resolutions (e.g. so that you can easily compare one prioritization done at a 1 km resolution with another prioritization done at a 5km resolution). If you want to try something like that, then something like Uber's H3 system might be useful -- but those are hexagons and could also be overkill for what you're interested in.

ricschuster commented 3 years ago

Neat to see that you and JC think alike. The nested grid system is the idea. JC will share his thinking on this next week, but he's probably thinking along the lines of the H3 system.