Habitat suitability for Colorado Blue Spruce

This post is a placeholder for an assignment on habitat suitability that was not completed in a rigorous fashion.

The targeted species is Picea pungens, also called Colorado blue spruce, Colorado spruce, silver spruce, and pino real.
Ref https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/misc/ag\_654/volume\_1/picea/pungens.htm

Progress was made towards obtaining data for analysis

Position data includes
Census TIGER Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/tiger-data-products-guide.html
For the GEOID of Boulder County boundary (08013)
As well as for Hydrography - Census linear water
https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2024/LINEARWATER/tl_2024_08013_linearwater.zip A buffer of 100 meters was created

Soil data from POLARIS (described at http://hydrology.cee.duke.edu/POLARIS/PROPERTIES/v1.0/Readme was downloaded for mean pH with normalized emphasis on soils the Blue Spruce prefers of pH is 6.8 to 7.2, neutral to slightly alkaline

A digital elevation model was obtained from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (STRM) which was collected in 1999 onboard the Endeavour for 11 days. As the orbit of the shuttle was not circumpolar but sinusoidal it was only possible to cover a small portion of the earth surface. The shuttle therefore used the reflection of emitted radar signals in the so-called C-band (wavelength 5.6 cm) for the SIR-C sensor developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the X-band (wavelength 3.1 cm) for the X-SAR sensor developed by the German Aerospace Agency. Reference: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/instruments/srtm

A dataset for the preferred Blue spruce elevation was reselected based upon the southern_range \= (1830, 2130) m # (6000-7000 ft)
combined_range \= (2130, 2740) m # (7000-9000 ft)
northern_range \= (2740, 3050) m # (9000-10000 ft)

And the DEM was also normalized for the aspect as the Blue Spurce prefers north facing slopes which were given a value of 1.0, while east and west slopes were given a value of 0.5 and south facing slopes a value of 0.

This data was combined and harmonized with darker areas being more suitable in this analysis with a weight of
0.1, for preferred soil pH
0.3, for being within 100m of hydrogaphy
0.2, for the north, east, or west aspect
0.5 for the preferred elevation range

The result was this overlay of where the darker area are estimated to be more suitable for the species given the above criteria and weighs which were estimated without detailed botanical knowledge by the author.

Next the preferred locations were compared to a climate model Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Earth System Model 2G which considers Differences in the ocean mean state include the thermocline depth being relatively deep in ESM2M and relatively shallow in ESM2G compared to observations
https://www.usgs.gov/publications/gfdls-esm2-global-coupled-climate-carbon-earth-system-models-part-i-physical

This was then built into another overlay side by side by date range

The scale flipped in this instance, where the lighter areas are more likely habitat and darker areas less likely
Visual analysis of the data seems to show that there are areas that may have more precipitation in the future, but that those may be outside of the preferred habitat area. Further analysis might determine whether the hydrography would conduct that precipitation to the habitat areas, as well as to compare a number of climate models as this single one may be an outlier among the various models.

Data and code used can be found at https://github.com/gpb3037/bluespruce