2 Technical details

AquaSat v2 uses the {targets} workflow management R package (Landau, 2021) to reimagine the original AquaSat codebase. The framework for this workflow is based on code adapted from this USGS pipeline and has been further developed by members of the ROSSyndicate.

Technical details on {targets} workflows are available in the {targets} User Manual. {targets} workflows are built upon lists of “targets”, which can be thought of as analytical steps written out in code. This workflow uses a targets list spread across multiple scripts in an effort to facilitate organization of the code. _targets.R serves as a main list of targets and references the other lists of targets, which are defined inside 3_harmonize.R and create_bookdown.R. Note that the downloading and harmonizing scripts for WQP data are spread across two GitHub repositories: AquaMatch_download_WQP and AquaMatch_harmonize_WQP, respectively.

We recommend using the latest version of R for the best performance when running the pipeline. Additionally, this pipeline relies on .RDS files, for which a significant vulnerability fix was instituted in version 4.4.0 of R. Details about this vulnerability are documented in NIST’s National Vulnerability Database.