The B.C. Wildlife Federation’s Wetlands Workforce project is a collaboration with conservation organizations and First Nations working to maintain and monitor wetlands across British Columbia. https://bcwf.bc.ca/initiatives/wetlands-workforce/.
The Wetland Ecosystem Services Protocol (WESP-BC) model is a standardized method for assessing the function and value of the services provided by wetlands within British Columbia.
Wespr is an R package to assist with the preparation and assessment of wesp-BC scores. The package provides tools to assist with 1) downloading spatial layers, 2) prepossessing field and desktop questionnaires, 3) calculating wesp-BC scores for a range of functional and beneficial ecosystem indicators, 4) advanced functions to upload and verify calibration data sets.
Installation
You can install the development version of wespr from GitHub with:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("BCWF-Wetlands/wespr")Worked examples
A series of vignettes with step by step instructions is provided to assist users. It is assumed that users are generally familiar with the process of wespr-BC and have at least a basic knowledge of R coding. Further information on the WESP-BC data collection process is available here
1) Pre-processing spatial data
Prepare spatial layers vignette walks through a helper function to downloads a standard set of spatial layers via the bcdata packge. This data provides a majority of information required to answer desktop analysis portion of the wesp-BC protocol
2) Post data survey123 datasets
Once the user has answered the required field and desktop survey123 surveys (and output these as .csv files), we use the format_rawinputs() function to standardize the input data into a structure that allows us to calculate the wespr-BC values. This step by step guide details the process.
3) Calculate Wespr scores - single site
Once the raw data has been converted to the wespr input format we can calculate the wespr scores for the given site and compare these against a calibration dataset within the same Eocprovince.
4) Calculate Wespr scores - multiple site
Alternatively, where we have multiple wetland information, we can generate scores from multiple sites.
5) Advanced topics
For those interested in understanding how the wespr package operates under the hood. This technical vignette provides advanced topics for keeners interested in understanding the structure of the R package in more detail. This covers two advanced topics 1) How to update provincial ecoprovince calibration data and 2) Understanding the anatomy of a wespr object.
These are advanced topics and not required to generate scores.