bcgov/forDRAT is an R package developed by the BC Ministry of Forests to share information about historical and projected future drought risk in mature forests in the province.
You can install forDRAT directly from this GitHub repository. To
proceed, you will need the
remotes package:
install.packages("remotes")Next, install and load the forDRAT package using
remotes::install_github():
remotes::install_github("bcgov/forDRAT")
library(forDRAT)The ‘forDRAT’ package provides an estimate of drought risk in mature forests across different tree species, biogeoclimatic units and relative soil moisture regimes. The modeling approach is described in DeLong et al. (2019).
The package contains two datasets:
- drought_data data frame which contains estimated mean annual AET:PET for xeric to subhygric sites in 210 BGC variants, for four different time periods.
- tree_risk data frame which contains estimated estimated AET:PET thresholds for different tree species, based on distribution of trees species across actual soil moisture regimes, and field observations.
The main function in this package is classify_tree_risk which is used to generate species-specific drought risk ratings for sites with AET:PET estimates.
The drought risk estimates were generated using a water-balance modeling approach as implemented in the Tree and Climate Assessment (TACA) model developed by Nitschke and Innes (2008).
The TACA model uses daily climate data, which is sparse in the province. In order to provide drought-risk estimates for all biogeoclimatic units in the province, we used the PNWNAmet gridded daily climate dataset, developed by Werner et al. (2019). More information and dataset download are available here. We plan to publish an extension note that details how the PNWNAmet dataset was used in TACA and forDRAT.
DeLong, S.C., Griesbauer, H., Nitschke, C.R., Foord, V. and Rogers, B., 2019. Development of a drought risk assessment tool for British Columbia forests using a stand-level water-balance approach. Prov. BC, Victoria. BC Tech. Rep. 125. www. for. gov. bc. ca/hfd/pubs/Docs/Tr/Tr125. htm.
Nitschke, C.R. and Innes, J.L., 2008. A tree and climate assessment tool for modelling ecosystem response to climate change. Ecological modelling, 210(3), pp.263-277. doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2007.07.026
Werner, A.T., Schnorbus, M.A., Shrestha, R.R., Cannon, A.J., Zwiers, F.W., Dayon G. and Anslow, F., 2019. A long-term, temporally consistent, gridded daily meteorological dataset for northwestern North America, Scientific Data, 6, 180299, doi:10.1038/sdata.2018.299