Download Geospatial Data Available from Several Federated Data Sources

Download geospatial data available from several federated data sources (mainly sources maintained by the US Federal government). Currently, the package enables extraction from nine datasets: The National Elevation Dataset digital elevation models (< https://www.usgs.gov/3d-elevation-program> 1 and 1/3 arc-second; USGS); The National Hydrography Dataset (< https://www.usgs.gov/national-hydrography/national-hydrography-dataset>; USGS); The Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database from the National Cooperative Soil Survey (< https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/>; NCSS), which is led by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) under the USDA; the Global Historical Climatology Network (< https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/global-historical-climatology-network-daily>; GHCN), coordinated by National Climatic Data Center at NOAA; the Daymet gridded estimates of daily weather parameters for North America, version 4, available from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Distributed Active Archive Center (< https://daymet.ornl.gov/>; DAAC); the International Tree Ring Data Bank; the National Land Cover Database (< https://www.mrlc.gov/>; NLCD); the Cropland Data Layer from the National Agricultural Statistics Service (< https://www.nass.usda.gov/Research_and_Science/Cropland/SARS1a.php>; NASS); and the PAD-US dataset of protected area boundaries (< https://www.usgs.gov/programs/gap-analysis-project/science/pad-us-data-overview>; USGS).

FedData is an R package implementing functions to automate downloading geospatial data available from several federated data sources.

Currently, the package enables extraction from nine datasets:

• The National Elevation Dataset (NED) digital elevation models (1 and 1/3 arc-second; USGS)
• The National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) (USGS)
• The Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database from the National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS), which is led by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) under the USDA
• The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), coordinated by National Climatic Data Center at NOAA
• The Daymet gridded estimates of daily weather parameters for North America, version 4, available from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC)
• The International Tree Ring Data Bank (ITRDB), coordinated by National Climatic Data Center at NOAA
• The National Land Cover Database (NLCD), including the annual NLCD data
• The NASS Cropland Data Layer from the National Agricultural Statistics Service
• The PAD-US dataset of protected area boundaries from the USGS

This package is designed with the large-scale geographic information system (GIS) use-case in mind: cases where the use of dynamic web-services is impractical due to the scale (spatial and/or temporal) of analysis. It functions primarily as a means of downloading tiled or otherwise spatially-defined datasets; additionally, it can preprocess those datasets by extracting data within an area of interest (AoI), defined spatially. It relies heavily on the sf and terra packages.

Development

• Kyle Bocinsky - Montana Climate Office, Missoula, MT

Contributors

• Dylan Beaudette - USDA-NRCS Soil Survey Office, Sonora, CA
• Jeffrey Hollister - US EPA Atlantic Ecology Division, Narragansett, RI
• Scott Chamberlain - ROpenSci and Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley

Install FedData

• From CRAN:

install.packages("FedData")

• Development version from GitHub:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ropensci/FedData")

• Linux: Follow instructions for installing sf available at https://r-spatial.github.io/sf/, then install either from CRAN or GitHub.

Getting Started

Check out our Getting Started article.

Acknowledgements

This package is a product of SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments) and the Village Ecodynamics Project through grants awarded to the University of Montana, the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, and Washington State University by the National Science Foundation. This software is licensed under the MIT license. Continuing development is supported by the Montana Climate Office.

FedData was reviewed for rOpenSci by @jooolia, and was greatly improved as a result. rOpenSci on-boarding was coordinated by @sckott.