rOpenSci package or resource used*
What did you do?
I was looking for a simple way to share code for a unique figure of cartogram bar charts related to the frequency of “ice” flags in public U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) streamgage data.
I could have written a regular script but I needed the code to download a lot of data for all 50 U.S. states. These downloads can sometimes timeout and trigger you to have to start again. Due to this concern, I decided to use targets to build a pipeline that could handle skipping downloads that were already successful if I needed to start again.
A regular targets setup using the _targets.R file to write and orchestrate your code would certainly work; however, I noticed that a section related to using targets and R Markdown was recently added to the User Manual and I wanted to give that a try. This was my first time using targets with R Markdown, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. I love that in the end, it is just one button click (or maybe a few if there is a network failure during the downloads) to build the full pipeline and show the results. I am excited for using this more in the future.
URL or code snippet for your use case*
You can find the R Markdown file at https://github.com/USGS-VIZLAB/blitz-FY21Q3/blob/835a05bf725d53ace5bf9884435b53402b97ec6e/ice_flags/ice_pipeline.Rmd. The Rmd file produces the basic cartogram behind the visualization featured in this Tweet. We added the text later using InkScape to save on time since this was a very small, constrained project.
Note that this Rmd will download 9 months of daily data for all 50 U.S. states by default, which takes awhile. Read the text in the Rmd to see how to adjust for a shorter time period or fewer states if you are interested in testing this but can’t wait a few hours for the data!
Image
Sector
government
Field(s) of application
hydrology