Buffering an initial landscape

[Steve Cumming]

For many simulation studies, it's really necessary to buffer the target landscape to reduce edge effects. Often, this is ignored, and it should not be.

What would be handy would be a step in the dataprep or some similar module where this was done automagically, and a modified mask was provided of 1 for inner landscape, 0 for buffer area, and NA for out of bounds.

Has there been any thought given to this problem? I am encountering it severely in revising the scfm calibration tools, and would like to participate in a fully general solution. 

Steve

[ceresv...@hotmail.com]

I haven't come across this problem, so I don't know if there has been any thinking going in this direction.

However, it seems to me that this would be an easy enough function to create with `raster::buffer` or a similar function.

[Alex Chubaty]

Hi Steve,

I'm actually using a method adapted by Ceres for buffering my study area polygon. `outerBuffer` is currently in my `amc` package on GitHub https://github.com/achubaty/amc/blob/development/R/polygons.R

You can use this buffered polygon and the original to define the buffer region of the raster (i.e., to produce the mask) but I haven't actually done this.

Alex