Generating Climate Engine Site Characterization Reports for Custom Areas of Interest

About the Custom Site Characterization Reports

The Climate Engine team has published a new tool to allow resource managers, analysts, and other users to produce site characterization reports for any location in the lower 48 states, with direct support for filtering by land ownership/management type for Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Parks Service, and others. You can find the new Climate Engine reporting tool at reports.climateengine.org. Using the dropdown menus for Site Characterization and select “Generate report.” The reports utilize the Rangeland Analysis Platform (RAP) data, gridMET data, and gridMET drought multi-scalar indice data to provide spatial and temporal insights.

Custom Site Characterization Report User Interface

Steps to Generate a Report

Step 1: Define Area of Interest

There are three 'areas of interest' options to select an area to generate a report for. The first option is selecting a 'Priority Region'. These are pre-loaded regions that may be of interest to a variety of users. When one of the 'Priority Region' datasets is selected, the regions are added to the map on the left of the UI. For some regions, you may have to zoom in further to see them. To select an area within the 'Priority Region' you can either utilize the drop-down or click on the area in the map. Once you select an area, the Site Name will be updated on the right side of the UI.

Priority Region option for Defining Area of Interest

The second option is uploading a shapefile. To use this option, click on 'Shapefile upload' and you will see the left panel update to allow you to upload the shapefile. First, click on the 'Choose Files' and select either a zipped shapefile or all of the individual components of the shapefile. Next, you will need to select the field name from the polygon's 'properties' to use for polygon names to choose from. Similar to the 'Priority Regions', to select an area within the shapefile you can either utilize the drop-down or click on the area in the map. Once you select an area, the Site Name will be updated on the right side of the UI.

Shapefile Upload option for Defining Area of Interest

Shapefile Guidance

Preparing your shapefile. Use the guidance below if you run into issues.

Make sure that your shapefile has coordinates in the geographic (latitude/longitude) projection, preferably in the EPSG:4326 projection.
Make sure that your geometry coordinates are [{longitude in degrees North}, {latitude in degrees East}] and not [{latitude}, {longitude}].
Make sure that you have simplified your polygons to have the minimum number of vertices to describe your area so that the app is better able to handle your polygon and provide a sharelink for it. You can use mapshaper.org to do simplification of the vertices.
Make sure that you have removed all columns from your shapefile except for a column that has strings (not numbers) for the names of your different polygons.

Using your shapefile to generate a Site Characterization report:

Select either a zipped shapefile or all of the individual components of the shapefile in a folder (.shp, .dbf, .shx, .prj extensions required).
Select the property name in your shapefile that you want to use to select an individual polygon.
Select the individual feature (from the dropdown or the map) that you want to analyze by either clicking a feature displayed in the map or selecting from the dropdown menu.

The third option is drawing a polygon. To use this option, click on 'Draw Polygon' and you will see the left panel update with a pentagon polygon tool being added to the top left-hand side of the map. By clicking on this tool, you can draw and set of vertices to create your custom drawn polygon. Remember to close the polygon by either clicking on your first vertice or clicking the finish button which is available while drawing the polygon to the right of the pentagon polygon tool. If you need to edit the polygon, you can click on the little box with a pencil which is located right under the pentagon polygon tool and above the trash can on the map. If you want to delete your drawn features to start over, you can either click the red 'Delete drawn features' button in the directions section or utilize the trash can on the map.

Draw Polygon option for Defining Area of Interest

Step 2: Provide Information for the Report

There are a few pieces of information that you will need to provide to recieve your report. Some are required and some are optional to more useful information to the report for user context. The first is an email address that will be used to email the report and accompanying data files to the user once the tool has run. The second is the 'Site name' which will be added to the header of the report. Both of these are required to submit the request for your custom report. The next two are 'Site type' and 'Site description' which are both optional.

Once you fill out the information to send and label your report, you have the option of customize which lands to include in your report.These reports allow for two options for controlling which land ownership and landcover types are included in your report. Use the land ownership dropdown menu if you want to limit your report to land owned, administered, or managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Department of Defense (DOD), Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), National Parks Service (NPS), and US Forest Service (USFS). Select “None” to include all lands in your reports. The land ownership layer comes from the National Surface Management Agency dataset provided by BLM. The other option is a checkbox to exclude water, cultivated crops, and developed lands from the report, which uses the National Land Cover Database to identify these landcover types. The selections for these options will be indicated at the top of the report.

You are now ready to click 'Submit Request'. When you do, a window will pop-up letting you know that your request is being processed.

You can either wait for another window to pop-up with a 'Download Report' button or close the windows and start on another request. If you choose to close the windows, you can access your report via a link that will be emailed to you.

The email will come from no-reply@climateengine.org and the subject line will reference the 'Site name' you provided. For this example, the subject line is 'Your Site Characterization Report for Strawberry Fire is Ready!'. All you have to do to access your report is click 'Download your Site Characterization Report' and a folder containing the underlying data, the images, and reports will be downloaded.

Email sent when custom report is completed

For the site characterization reports, the underlying data is the timeseries values for RAP, gridMET, and gridMET drought in csv format. The images are pngs of each of the figures in the report. The reports are available in both png and pdf format. At the bottom left hand of the report, the datasets used to produce the figures and the date the data is from are noted.

Additional User Guidance

Reports are only available for CONUS, if you select an AOI outside of CONUS you will receive an error. We do not return any sort of alert at this time if your polygon is partially outside of CONUS.
For the Site Characterization reports, polygons must be <50,000 sq km, roughly the size of many HUC6 watersheds and ~5 times larger than Yellowstone NP, so quite large. For the Drought reports polygons must be < 1,000,000 sq km or larger than the combined area of California, Texas, and Alaska (~1,000,000 km²).
I do have a check to ensure that there are valid pixels within the polygon after the ownership and landcover masks have been applied — including some information on these masks in the help article would be helpful.
Only polygons and multipolygons are allowed — no points or linestrings.