Development of Recommended Practices and Workflow for Publishing Digital Data through ScienceBase for Dynamic Visualization

Principal Investigator : Katherine J Chase, Andy Bock, Thomas R Sando
 

Accomplishments

• The project team developed an interactive mapping application in R that connects to data on ScienceBase, using Shiny, Leaflet (Cheng and Xie, 2016), and sbtools (Winslow and others, 2016) (fig. 10). USGS scientists can refer to the R code in the mapping application to build their own interactive maps. Code is available at the USGS Bitbucket Repository https://my.usgs.gov/bitbucket/projects/CDI/repos/interactive-mapping (content no longer available).  The map application is a lightweight desktop interactive map with two intended audiences:  (1) USGS scientists interested in learning how to develop applications from a ScienceBase data release, and (2) researchers, collaborators, and cooperators associated with regional research efforts related to the work of Chase and others (2016a).  The four components to the application are (1) a user interface where the user selects the period of record, streamflow variable, and climate dataset of interest; (2) a map that displays the data based on the user’s query from the first component for the stream features from Chase and others (2016a); (3) an interactive map on which users can query the hydrographic features associated with Chase and others (2016a, b); and (4) a dynamic table which displays data for the selected climate datasets across all periods of record and streamflow variables based on the hydrographic feature selected in the third component.  The developers used R and its associated libraries based upon the support and expertise for R language and tools that are in-house at the Office of Water Information. The developers felt that in the future such applications should leverage as many existing USGS tools (such as the sbtools package in R) as possible. 
• The project team documented the process to organize and share data on ScienceBase as well as the interactive map example in USGS Open-File Report 2016–1202 (Chase and others, 2017).
• The project team developed a webinar to share this process with USGS scientists, and the webinar took place on February 22, 2017.