/climpart

Source code for the Shiny climate partitioning app, climpart.

Primary LanguageHTML

climpart

https://seedmapper.shinyapps.io/climpart/

The purpose of this app is to aid sampling efforts along climate gradients for a geographic region of interest. Examples of potential uses of this tool include: sampling plant materials for common garden studies, establishing common garden arrays, establishing vegetation transects, or banking seed for native plant conservation. Analyses are conducted on the Bioclim (http://www.worldclim.org/bioclim) dataset for the extent of North America (-168 to -52 degrees longitude and 7 to 83 degrees latitude). We chose to incorporate seven of these variables that together capture unique axes of multivariate climate space, including: mean annual temperature, diurnal range, temperature seasonality, temperature of wettest quarter, mean annual precipitation, precipitation seasonality, and precipitation of warmest quarter. To operate the app, the user may input a lat/long bounding box with the supplied slider bars or a spatial polygon. They then specify the number of partitions (as many as 50), click the "Generate Partitions" button, and the app then uses cluster analysis to group the user- defined climate space into the desired number of partitions. Within each partition the app identifies the map cell that corresponds to the multivariate median, or medoid, which we refer to as a climate center. After calculating these points, the app then assigns each map cell to the climate center closest in climate space and maps these assignments as regions of differing colors. Also reported are the corresponding coordinates and Bioclim data for each of the climate centers, as well as the distributions of their assignments. The user can then download and explore the underlying rasters, climate center data, and within-assignment distributions for offline use.