BEACONs Hydrology R Functions

BEACONs developped a range of hydrology functions for adding ecological attributes to conservation areas, such as identifying all watershed catchments upstream (or downstream), calculating their area and intactness values and calculating hydrological connectivity within each conservation area or network.

The 4 main hydrology functions are:

• calc_dci
• calc_lwdci
• get_upstream_catchments
• get_downstream_catchments

calc_dci

The function calc_dci() calculates dendritic connectivity index (DCI) for a set of conservation areas, which quantifies the “longitudinal connectivity of river networks based on the expected probability of an organism being able to move freely between two random points of the network” (Cote et al. 2009).

calc_lwdci

The function calc_lwdci() computes a distinct DCI value for each group of BASIN streams within the conservation area. It then calculates a weighted average of these values, using the stream lengths in each BASIN as weights. It minimize the impact of fragmentation on streams inside a conservation areas, due to different ocean drainage basin, giving a more realistic picture of how much of the functional network remains connected for species movement.

get_upstream_catchments

The function get_upstream_catchments() calculates the area upstream of a giver polygon using catchments and stream flow attributes.

get_downstream_catchments

The function get_downstream_catchments() calculates the area downstream of a given polygon using catchments and stream flow attributes.

Citation

Houle M, Vernier P, Lisgo K, Edwards M, Schmiegelow F (2025). BEACONs R_Tools_Public: Building conservation areas in R. Available at https://beaconsproject.github.io/R_tools_public/.