[GIS] How to create a solar intensity map for a garden plot

arcgis-desktoparcpypythonrraster

I'm interested in creating a raster surface that depicts the average solar intensity per unit area for a small garden plot. I imagine the inputs into the model would be the following:

Plot area–for simplicity sake, let's assume the garden plot is
circular.
Average tree height of surrounding forest edge
Solar intensity at various sun angles
The average sun angle in relation to the garden plot over time.

I ultimately want to show the best location for plant growth within garden plots that are surrounded by trees. Could anyone point me toward a solution for this analysis? I'm sure someone has done this already, although I cannot find any references.

Edit:

For example purposes, the attached image shows a 1 acre garden plot surrounded by an even-aged stand of conifers. To further simplify this analysis, let's assume we're interested in only the solar zenith and intensity during the gardening season from June to October. Felling trees is not an option!

enter image description here

Best Answer

Just an idea:

I've never done such a task, but SAGA GIS has a module called Potential Incoming Solar Radiation, where you can calculate the theoretical solar radiation for a given place (with optional atmospherically and spatial parameters). If i understand the method right you could also define a so called Sky View Factor of the visible sky above your location. Maybe you could alter the input (which is calculated by another SAGA module) for your garden by considering the tree shadows.

The rest is biological interpretation and depends on your garden plants and trees and their DBH/age/crown and canopy diameter/type of species/.....

enter image description here

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[GIS] Plot a Raster in R with white space for NA values

It seems like the band you are plotting does not have the NA values correctly specified, and has a value of 94 instead, otherwise its hard to explain how you get the above plot result. So you have to clean that data layer.

One option to do that could be to make an overlay with another band from the same raster. If you have another layer otherband with correctly specified NA values with the same "structure" as r (i.e. the NA values in another band are the same as in the one you show above), you could overlay those two.

rna <- overlay(r, otherband, fun=function(x,y){if(is.na(y)) return(NA) else return(x)})

If you want to try the conversion instead, I would suggest reclassification. The raster package has a memory efficient function for reclassification of rasters. Your could replace the value 94 with a NA value with the reclassify function.

rna <- reclassify(r, cbind(94, NA))

[GIS] How to plot a common colorbar for mutiple raster plots in a single image in R

I see you make a for loop to print each time, if you do this, each time it will print a scale; you may set it to false and at the end place it;

For a job like the one you want to do i used

library(gplot)

which, like the "raster" package is also created by R: Hijmans it facets like ggplot2, prints a single scalebar and you may also give spatialpolygonsdataframes to it.

For reducing space, pass a bbox() or extent() argument to your plot function, this fits the plotting region to your spatial data

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[GIS] Plot a Raster in R with white space for NA values

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