Analysis of ecosystem representation in BC

Ecosystem representation was calculated as the percent conserved of each Biogeoclimatic Ecosystem Classification variant at the Ecoregion and Provincial level. (https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/bec-map).

The primary outputs of this analysis are:

1. A spatial file detailing the ecosystem representation of BEC variants by Ecoregion and by the Province
2. A spatial file of underrepresented ecosystems using 17% conserved as a threshold (by Ecoregion). The percent conserved includes terrestrial PPAs and OECMs (total_conserved) that were assembled using the output from this repo: https://github.com/bcgov/protected-lands-and-waters-indicator.

• Users can modify the ecosystem represention layer (1) and create a version of the underrepresented ecosystems layer.

Key information for users

• Representation of BEC variants in the Protected/Conserved Area system in B.C. was calculated at the Ecoregion level:
  • Parks and Protected Areas (PPAs) - column name: percent_conserved_total
  • Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures (OECMs, defined according to Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database (CPCAD)) - column name: percent_conserved_oecm
  • Total Conserved = PPA + OECM - column name: perecent_conserved_total
• Representation at the provincial level:
  • Parks and Protected Areas (PPAs) - column name: percent_conserved_total_prov
  • Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures (OECMs, defined according to Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database (CPCAD)) - column name: percent_conserved_oecm_prov
  • Total Conserved = PPA + OECM - column name: perecent_conserved_total_prov
• The linework between the BC boundary, ecoregions, and BEC variants do not exactly match creating sliver polygons. To reduce the number of slivers and the impact on the overall analysis, the distribution of a variant across two different ecoregions was calculated (percent_var_in_eco).
  • For the underrepresented spatial output file, if a variant was <5% in an ecoregion, it was considered a sliver and removed from the representation analysis

Data

The analysis uses data from several sources. The data does not need to be pre-downloaded to run the code.

• Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database (CPCAD)
• Ecoregions - Ecoregion Ecosystem Classification of British Columbia (Licence: Open Government Licence - British Columbia)
• Biogeoclimatic Ecosystem Classification (BEC) Map (Licence: Open Government Licence - British Columbia)

Targets Workflow

This project leverages the targets package, a pipeline toolkit for data science projects in R. You can install targets from CRAN:

#install.packages("targets")

Usage Run targets::tar_make() to run project. This will run all of

the analysis - no individual scripts are required.

Required R packages

The packages used in this analysis are catalogued in packages.R. The packages will be loaded automatically with tar_make() but some may need to be installed prior to initiating the workflow.

Getting Help or Reporting an Issue

To report bugs/issues/feature requests, please file an issue.

How to Contribute

If you would like to contribute, please see our CONTRIBUTING guidelines.

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

License

Copyright 2016 Province of British Columbia

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at 

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

This repository is maintained by Environmental Reporting BC. Click here for a complete list of our repositories on GitHub.