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PNHP / COA

Pennnsylvania Conservation Opportunity Area Tool development scripts
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Tagging PUs with aquatic species data #25

Open ChristopherTracey opened 7 years ago

ChristopherTracey commented 7 years ago

One issue that we haven't entirely figured out so far is how to tag planning units with aquatic species. While we may use habitat associations for some species, we may want to rely on high quality spatial information that we have available.

In the following example, SGCN are represented by the red triangles, streams are the blue lines, and the catchments are the dark blue lines (note: that the catchments are actually coded in the hexes, but I loaded this layer in for clarity): image

I would like to propose that, for any particular SGCN occurrence, we, select the PUs that overlap the stream flowline that overlaps (or is closest to) the point and tag these as 'High' probability of occurrence. We could do something similar for lines and polygons, but apply it to all overlapping catchments. Actually that brings up a question of whether or not we should buffer the points and select any overlapping catchments--this could solve some of the small catchment issues.

Also, are the catchment wide actions (i.e. preserve forest cover) that we may want to apply to the whole catchment. How do we handle that?

Thoughts?

ChristopherTracey commented 7 years ago

This is still an outstanding issue, but we may want to move it to v2 of the tool. What do you think @dyeany ?

dyeany commented 7 years ago

I agree with this: "for any particular [AQUATIC] SGCN [ POINT] occurrence, we, select the PUs that overlap the stream flowline that overlaps (or is closest to) the point and tag these as 'High' probability of occurrence."

We should discuss the lines and polygons issue further. One thought is to actually convert all aquatic SGCN occurrences to NHD flowlines. Without seeing an actual example of this, its hard to say if this actually happens but we wouldn't want to say "High" occ prob for a species that lives in the stream channel 3 PU away from the actual NHD flowline.

Regarding catchment wide actions, we could compromise by linking these action to the flowline PUs and indicated the action should be applied to X, Y, and Z catchments upstream of AOI. Would that work?