Recharge Suitability Mapping for Jordan Valley

As part of a larger collaboration between the USGS, USAID, and partners in Jordan and Lebanon, we developed an open-source and interactive web application that allows users to classify, weight, and combine layers to produce suitability maps easily and transparently. The user can choose how to make suitability classifications within each spatial layer, how to apply relative weights to different spatial layers, and observe how those changes affect the resulting suitability map and distribution of suitability scores across the landscape. The application has two pre-loaded spatial layers describing modeled runoff and surface slope and uses a simplified version of suitability mapping. Values within each input layer are classified as having either “Good” or “Poor” suitability, based on a user-supplied threshold value chosen using interactive sliders. Those layers are then weighted based on user-supplied weights and linearly aggregated to create a final suitability map.
The application is not meant as a substitute for more formal suitability mapping techniques. Rather, the web application is presented as a tool aimed at end-users and stakeholders as a way to increase transparency and process-understanding throughout the development of suitability mapping. We use example data from the Jordan Valley, a subset of our full project region to demonstrate the capabilities of the application. The web application was written in R (v 4.0.3) with shiny package (v 1.0.6). This resource will be updated with a link to the full project when the project report is published.