Posts

After spending a few kiddo nap times experimenting with low-level Apache Arrow representations of vectors in R, I remembered a lively GitHub discussion of Arrow representations of geometry in R. The arrow R package can already round-trip sf objects to and from feather and parquet formats, and the sfarrow package does so as well with a slightly different encoding.

A new version of wk is fresh on CRAN! Version 0.5 introduces some new features to the framework, incorporates most of the functionality that was previously in the wkutils package, and fixes a number of bugs that popped up in the development of s2 and geos.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post on using R and sf to work with stream networks. The post was about low-level analysis with the Nova Scotia stream network to find upstream networks of various lakes so that I could approximate the catchments without a province-wide DEM analysis.

About the time the COVID-19 pandemic began, I started getting interested in some low-level geometry programming in R. Around that time the vctrs package was starting to mature and dplyr version 1.

In some recent adventures parsing text embedded within binary files, I came across the need to correctly interpret input bytes from a file representing a character string. As a developer, you want to write software that protects users from ever having to deal with an encoding issue!

Avid readers of this blog, if there are any, would have figured out that I really love low-level data IO and hacking proprietary file formats so that I can use the data in the open-source (mostly) software that I know and love.

Today the pivotal and final chapter of my Ph.D. thesis was published in Science of the Total Environment! I’ve been excited about Pb deposition ever since my honours thesis, when I measured Pb (and other elements) in two lakes near the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border.

I have to start with saying that there’s a lot of ways to write scientific articles with all of these tools. In particular, there’s some great guides from rOpenSci, packages with LaTeX templates for major publishers, and R packages to help with reproducible documents.

This is a preview of the wk package for R, which is currently undergoing the CRAN submission process. I’m just so excited about it that I can’t wait to start talking about what it can do!

If you can’t tell from my last two posts, I’m trying to delineate watersheds for about 650 lakes. We’ve gotten to the point where we can calculate an approximate catchment using the upstream network, and call the QGIS processing algorithms we need to delineate the catchment from the outlet.