For our Sierra Nevada Meadows Database project that catalogued more than 17,000 meadows in the Sierra Nevada, I built two pieces of software that extracted environmental parameters relevant to each meadow. The software:
- Determined the outlet point of each meadow
- Delineated a catchment for each meadow based on the outlet point
- Extracted data on relevant climatic parameters about the catchment
- Attached those variables as attributes to the meadows.
The software deals with overlapping catchments for meadows, includes pause and resume support, and includes a few speedups that use the HUC 12 drainage network to determine the maximum size of the catchment before delineation to reduce the raster processing space and the amount of disk reading and writing.
This software was also used for our assessment of California’s dams and their health for native fish populations.