This week we will use Rmarkdown and Github Pages to author a static website. The skills learned will include Rmarkdown formating, project organization, and a brief introduction to HTML/CSS. The ultimate goal is to improve your understanding of local/remote repositories and to build the tools for communicating your work in a reproducable, sharable way.

This week we will practice data wrangling and visualization skills using real-time COVID-19 data maintained by the New York Times. Emphasis is placed on data.frame manipulation, and joining datasets.

This week we will work with simple feature objects and geos measures. Emphasis is placed on feature aggregations (combines/unions); coordinate references systems; and distance measurements. You will work to replicate the ACLU assessment that 2/3 of the USA population lives within the 100 mile “Border Zone” where 4th ammendment rights are being questioned.

This week we will work with the National Dams Inventory. Questions of geometry simplication, centroid generation, and tesselations will be raised. We will uses our tesselations to explore the distribution of dams (and dam purpose) across the USA and challenges with the MAUP.

This week we will work with multiband raster files to detect and analyze a flood event near Palo, Iowa. We will complete the entire workflow from data aquisition through analysis in R and will see how the raster data structure allows us to draw meaningful conclusions from the data. This kind of work goes on regularly and is part of a couple national efforts (NOAA, USGS, FirstStreet, FEMA) to generate flood inundation libraries that contribute to better extraction and classification of real-time flood events, resource allocation during events, and damage assessments post events.