BRAT Summaries and Visualizations

[joewheaton]

Just moving an email conversation over here as it is quite helpful to get us thinking about our HTML reports more explicilty.

@philipbaileynar posted to @AldenShallcross:

Joe forward me your spreadsheet and document with some BRAT summary charts, asking how easy it would be to include them in each BRAT run. The answer is VERY easy. Take a look,

https://youtu.be/LV0W8ZBKZiA

As I say in the video; I welcome any and all suggestions for improvements in how we can communicate the results of all our tools.

Then @AldenShallcross suggested:

I dig it. This is great and directly aligns with the agreement’s objective of creating information and knowledge from data….as well as incorporating this info into decisions/workflows. My guess is that the tools are also “value added” features that would bring people back again and again to a platform, tool, etc…….and that they make the info/knowledge that can be gained from the riverscapes data available to a much broader user base (NGO’s, watershed groups, those who can’t use GIS or wouldn’t take the time to run the calculations manually, etc.).

What about providing a user the ability to produce the report for a user-defined area of interest? For example, we may want to view the summaries for just BLM lands within a specific field office or district. Therefore, we would like to be able to provide a mask/ROI for BLM lands, calculate the stats for just that area, and output a summary report.

fwdbratresultsmontanadakotasquestionaboutslope.zip

[joewheaton]

I love this stuff @philipbaileynar and @AldenShallcross.

A few things from an example pyBRAT project: http://brat.riverscapes.xyz/Regions/USA/IDFG_Idaho/

As we discussed @philipbaileynar, the pyBRAT had a Collect_Summary_Products.py that assembled the following (typically at HUC 8, but we also combined all of these for Region or Statewide summaries.

Tabular Summaries

For a given area of interest, we typically summarize BRAT by:

Segment Type	Stream Length (m)	Stream Length (Km)	Stream Length (mi)	% of Drainage Network	Surveyed Dams Count	BRAT Estimated Capacity Dam Count	Average Surveyed Dam Density (Dams/Km)

The BRAT Estimated CApacity Dam Count is the calculated density multiplied by segment length summed for entire AOI.

If we are lucky enough to have some dam counts (e.g. from Dam Surveys at desktop or field), we can then additionally calculate:

Surveyed Dams Count	Average Surveyed Dam Density (Dams/Km)	% Modeled Capacity	Electivity Index

Together these look like:

An example is below for the Middle Bear HUC 8:
MiddleBear_SummaryTables_Perennial.xlsx

Notice there are the following tabular Summaries by primary outputs:

WAtershed Summary

Density Correlations

Existing Dam Building Capacity

Existing Dam Complex Size

Historic Dam Building Capacity

Historic Dam Complex Size

Existing vs. Historic Capacity

Conservation Restoration

Unsuitable or Limited

Undesireable Dams

Management Strategies

Predicted vs. Surveyed

Electivity Index

A Statewide Summary Example

This runs same stuff, but summing all of the other models (i.e. 80+ HUC 8s here)
Idaho_SummaryTable.xlsx

A simple comparison of Existing & Historic

Use Legends to Color Bar Plots

Although the bar plot above is not a good example, our preferred plots are horizontal bar plots (there is a guy from EPA who gave a talk here a few years back and talked about why they are preferable). I can't find the papers, but the take homes were:

• Easier to interpret than pie charts (especially when more categories)
• Richer information (you can put two scales (e.g. percent of network, miles of network, etc.) and labels.

Here's an example:

[philipbaileynar]

• nearly everything you suggest is easy. Just bums on seats.
• electivity and other analysis that use dam observations will have to wait until those data are either in a brat project or available via API from other sources. They are not currently readily available.
• I prefer bar over pie. If we must use pie charts then let's use donut pie. Tufte has good explanation for this.