6. Web Applications
We have developed two web applications that can be used with Castor. They were designed to support a work flow for creating and assessing alternative timber harvest scenarios. The Castor Scenario application was designed to support the development of a hypothetical management zone for implementing an alternative forest harvest scenario. The Castor Explorer application was designed to interface with a PostgreSQL database and visualize outputs from forest harvest simulation scenarios implemented in Castor. Both of these apps have a caribou focus, as they were primarily designed to support caribou recovery planning. However, they are also flexible in that they can be used for a variety of scenarios, and recent additions have been added to the app to support planning for other forest values.
Web applications were created using the Shiny package in program R. Shiny provides the ability to use R to create web pages. Each web application consists of two .R files, a ui.R file, that contains the code for the user interface, and a server.R file, which contains the code for querying and visualizing the data. Similar to Castor modules, the app code is all open source to allow users to further develop it to incorporate additional information of interest.
The front-end of these applications can be accessed through the web here. Note that you need to contact the Castor team to set-up a username and password for accessing the apps. Below we provide some more detail on each web application.
The Castor Scenario app was designed as a tool for understanding the current state of a landscape and creating a hypothetical new land use order to achieve a desired future state. It is ideally used to support a planning process, where planners or interest groups can explore a landscape and develop new hypothetical management 'zones' where they can apply alternative forest management regimes. The main interface is a map that users can manipulate by zooming in and out of areas, turning imagery on and off, and importantly, drawing and editing polygons. These polygons can be downloaded as shapefiles. Alternatively, shapefiles can be uploaded and manipulated in the app.
The app also allows the user to query landscape information within a polygon, for example, the area of disturbances such as roads, cutblocks and burns. Again, many of the tools in the app are caribou specific, but these could be modified to incorporate information on other values.
The end-goal of the app is to help users design and output an area where they can test a hypothetical alternative forest management regime to achieve a new, proposed land use objective. For example, in the context of caribou recovery, the user can identify an important habitat area for caribou where they want to apply new forest harvest constraints, such as no harvest. This hypothetical polygon and associated land use order can then be input as a parameter to the Castor model to estimates it's potential impact on forest harvest and caribou habitat.
The Castor Explorer application was designed as a tool for summarizing and visualizing the outputs of Castor model scenarios. It is intended to facilitate the interpretation of model results for users that do not necessarily want to interface with a PostgreSQL database and summarize the data on their own. The app consists of an interface for selecting an area of interest, scenarios within that area, and a variety of indicators that summarize output data from the Castor model scenarios.
The app has mostly been developed to summarize forestry and caribou indicators, because it was initially designed to support caribou recovery planning. For example, outputs include annual timber volume harvested and forested area cut, and caribou habitat quality indicators. The expectation is that the app will evolve and include additional indicators as additional Castor modules are developed. If developing a Castor module, it may be useful to consider how the outputs from the module might be designed so that the information can be easily summarized with the web application.