Reducing Impacts with Sustainable Solutions
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Project: The Rivers of South Africa
This was a project inspired by Mashford Mahute. In essence, it involved using the hydroshed database and creating a visually appealing map of various stream orders. With a specific focus on South Africa (including Lesotho and Swaziland), we took it a step further and conducted various basic analyses regarding the number of entries in the database, as well as mean and cumulative total lengths of the rivers per province, both including and excluding river orders as a factor.
Creating the base map is well documented in Mashford’s post. In addition to creating the base map, we created a spatial join between the clipped rivers file and a provincial border shapefile. From here we created the various summaries as mentioned. We also slightly tweaked the original map idea by overlying provincial borders in green, given that the summaries are, after all, per province. We specifically used R (with package sf and the tidyverse ecosystem) for our analyses, and you can find the full script below. So, download it and have fun!
(DISCLAIMER: we neither endorse nor disapprove of hydroshed data and its accuracy, or of the or the associated code and outputs)