estimate_cwd_load: Estimate coarse woody debris (1000-hour) fuel loads

In danfosterfire/Rfuels: Estimate Fuel Loads from Brown's Transects for Sierra Nevada Conifers

Description

Coarse woody debris is measured by recording the diameter and decay class of all 1000-hour fuels (7.62+ cm in diameter). Van WAgtendonk et al. (1996) and Brown (1974) give equations to estimate the fuel load (weight / area) represented by these data. For more details, see the vignette or the README.

Usage

estimate_cwd_load(dataset, type, k_value)

Arguments

dataset	A tidy data frame with a row for each observation, and columns for the sum of squared diamters for all sound and rotten 1000-hour fuels along the transect, and the observation-specific fuel coefficients. The observation-specific coefficients are given by get_1000h_coeffs(), and depend on the average secant of acute angle and specific gravity of the various species present in the overstory. Because the observed data include the sum of squared diameters of intersecting fuels, we don't need to estimate the quadratic mean diameter of the 1000-hour fuels.
type	A string, either 'rotten' or 'sound' decribing which values to read and write.
k_value	Currentlly k_value must equalt 1.234. This is a unit-conversion constant to relate the units of the observation data (transect lengths, square centimeters of cross-sectional area per transect) to the desired results units (metric tons per hectare). Brown's equations allow for a variety of input and output unit types, with different k values to translate between them. However, this code currently requires that all input and output values be in metric - see import_fuels() for more details.

Value

A numeric vector giving the estimated fuel loading (in Mg / ha) of the coarse woody debris represented by the observed sum of squared diameters on the transect.

danfosterfire/Rfuels documentation built on May 28, 2019, 11:04 p.m.