An R-package to generate and analyze Optimal Channel Networks
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. bioRxiv. doi:10.1101/2020.02.17.948851.
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)
# 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)
An error might occur when version 0.100.47 of package rgl is installed. Installation with rgl_0.100.30 works fine.
Installing packages rgdal and rgl (imported by OCNet) gives rise to errors. This can be solved by running
sudo apt install libftgl2 libcgal-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev apt-get libx11-dev libfreetype6-dev libgdal-dev
Luca Carraro (maintainer), Florian Altermatt, Emanuel A. Fronhofer, Reinhard Furrer, Isabelle Gounand, Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo