The true colour of water at Upper Penticton Creek -- data and scripts

These files contain data and scripts used in the analysis for an article titled " Streamwater colour in snow-dominated headwater catchments: natural variability and the effects of forest harvesting," by R.D. Moore, R.D. Winkler and G.D. Hope, to be published in Hydrological Processes.

The file upc_water_colour.csv contains the colour data as expressed in true colour units (TCU). The first line is a comment that should be skipped, noting that entries of "creek dry" have been manually edited out of this version of the data. All other editing was performed in the script named 0_wrangle_data.r. The columns are  as follows:

Year - year of observation as four-digit value (e.g., 2005)

Date - date as dd-Mmm (e.g., 15-May)

Day - day of year (e.g., 1-Jan = 1)

Cut241 - cumulative area harvested in 241 Creek as a percentage of catchment area

Cut242 - cumulative area harvested in 241 Creek as a percentage of catchment area

wc_240 - water colour (TCU) in 240 Creek

wc_241 - water colour (TCU) in 241 Creek

wc_242 - water colour (TCU) in 242 Creek

The scripts are numbered in the order of dependency. For example, a script beginning 0_ should be run before running a script beginning 1_. The scripts are set up to be run within an R project on the local hard drive. The project directory should contain a folder named data that contains upc_water_colour.csv. All other data sets are accessed programmatically within the scripts.

Brief descriptions of the scripts follow:

0_wrangle_data.r - Uses functions in the tidyhydat package to access streamflow data; corrects some erroneous entries for the water colour data; merges streamflow and colour data sets for further analysis.

0_wrangle_spatial_data.r - Accesses digital elevation models (DEMs) catchment boundaries and soil map from the Upper Penticton Creek data repository (zenodo); computes various topographic indices from the DEMS; saves processed files on the local hard drive in a folder named dem, located within the project root folder.

1_soil_maps.r - Generates a map of the gleyed soil units (Figure 2).

1_q_pca_trimonthly.r - Performs a paired-catchment analysis of the streamflow response to logging using a tri-monthly time step; generates plots of observed and predicted streamflow for 241 and 242 Creeks (Figure 3).

1_wc_analysis_post_140.r - Analyses water colour variations and response to logging; generates figures used in the article; analysis focuses on days 145 and on each year due to lack of data for earlier dates in the pre-harvest period.

1_catchment_characteristics.r - Computes topographic indices for each catchment and generates a table (Table 1) that contains a summary of catchment characteristics.

ch_saga_functions.r - Contains functions that use RSAGA package to process the digital elevation models to remove sinks and calculate contributing area grids.