About Merkle Lab Geospatial Data

The geospatial data available in this map viewer are saved in Pathfinder, a storage solution that enables a cloud-like presence hosted by ARCC. Pathfinder uses the Simple Storage Service (S3) protocol originally developed by Amazon. S3 works on object storage through a service called Ceph, provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Raster data is displayed on the map using a tile service called tiles.rdnt.io, specifically designed for displaying Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs). COGs are geospatial raster files optimized for efficient access and storage in cloud environments. They are structured and organized in a way that allows easy retrieval of specific portions of the raster data without requiring the entire file to be downloaded.

To read raster files in R using the `terra` or `raster` package, you can refer to the code below. By using the `/vsicurl/` prefix followed by a URL, GDAL treats the remote file as a regular file. This allows for reading and processing of the data without the need to download it explicitly to the local system.

          
            library(terra)
            #Change to the raster url you want to read in. 
            cog <- rast("/vsicurl/https://pathfinder.arcc.uwyo.edu/devise/MerkleLabGIS/Landcover/NLCD_2008_Landcover.tif") 
            plot(cog)

            library(raster)
            #Change to the raster url you want to read in. 
            obj<- raster("/vsicurl/https://pathfinder.arcc.uwyo.edu/devise/MerkleLabGIS/Landcover/NLCD_2008_Landcover.tif")
            plot(obj)
          
        

All geospatial layers in the S3 bucket can also be read in R using the following function which returns a dataframe of the URLS and other metadata.

          
            library(devtools)
            devtools::install_github("shapiro-gis/merklelabgis")
            library(merklelabgis)
            MerkleLabGIS <- bucket()