Background research on FIA

[diazrenata]

Purpose: Familiarizing myself with the exiting landscape of tools for interacting with FIA and background literature on technical + statistical challenges; so that I can begin to scope what would be involved in an R package (Evans project).

• [x] Read rFIA software paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364815219311089
• [ ] Skim rFIA source code: https://github.com/hunter-stanke/rFIA
  • [ ] How does rFIA connect to FIAdb?
  • [ ] Scope of functions in rFIA - what does it do?
  • [ ] Why is it currently failing? (CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rFIA/index.html)
• [ ] Track questions for team

[diazrenata]

rFIA status

• most rFIA development happened 2020-21
• recent PR (April '23) fixing what looks like a timeout downloading data for multiple states; don't see anything in reply from maintainers
• removed from CRAN March '23 due to failing functions

rFIA under-the-hood - outlines

• uses dtplyr for data table connections
• uses parallel and snow for...something, IDK what yet :)

more questions

• There is also the FIESTA package: https://usdaforestservice.github.io/FIESTA/. I think this used to be private (the rFIA software paper describes it as private) but it's on CRAN now (and passing): https://usdaforestservice.github.io/FIESTA/. Question: what is the Venn diagram of functionality in FIESTA, rFIA, and what this project intends to build?

[diazrenata]

• Datamart sometimes shows a 503 unavailable, but this exists so I think it's just a new version and the old one doesn't redirect https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/3641cea45d614ab88791aef54f3a1849/
• This is a Lot and probably also a Lot of Useful Info: https://www.fia.fs.usda.gov/library/database-documentation/current/ver90/FIADB%20User%20Guide%20P2_9-0-1_final.pdf
• See this (FIADB will be unavailable for our online tools to use from 9/18/2023 through 9/30/2023):

User Alerts:

Aug 2, 2023: Users should be aware that the FIADB will be updating volume and biomass estimates in September. The FIADB will be unavailable for our online tools to use from 9/18/2023 through 9/30/2023. This means that DATIM's ATIM Live Tool and EVALIDator (and the associated API) will be down during this time frame. DATIM's ATIM Static Tool and the FIADB downloads (CSV and SQLite databases) will remain available. More information about the upcoming changes can be found at https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/research/inventory/FIA/VBC.