An R-package to generate and analyze Optimal Channel Networks
Overview
OCNet enables the creation and analysis of Optimal Channel Networks (OCNs). These are oriented spanning trees (built on rectangular lattices made up of square pixels) that reproduce all scaling features characteristic of real, natural river networks. As such, they can be used in a variety of numerical and laboratory experiments in the fields of hydrology, ecology and epidemiology.
OCNs are obtained by minimization of a functional which represents total energy dissipated by water flowing through the network spanning the lattice. Such a formulation embeds the evidence that morphological and hydrological characteristics of rivers (in particular, water discharge and slope) follow a power-law scaling with drainage area.
For further details, please see Carraro et al. (2020). Generation and application of river network analogues for use in ecology and evolution. Ecology and Evolution. doi:10.1002/ece3.6479.
A minimal working example
Set the random seed to 1 and create an OCN in a 30x20 lattice with default options:
set.seed(1)
OCN <- create_OCN(30,20)Draw the so-obtained OCN:
draw_simple_OCN(OCN)
Installation
# install devtools (if previously not installed)
if (!("devtools" %in% installed.packages())) {install.packages("devtools")}
# install OCNet from GitHub
devtools::install_github("lucarraro/OCNet", build_vignettes = TRUE)