cyan_targets

A wide array of environmental data collects over swathes of the United States exists in the Water Quality Portal characterizing surface water conditions relevant to the presence and growth of cyanobacteria. cyan_targets is a workflow utilizing the R targets package to streamline the process of locating, downloading, and compiling these data based on user-input location, period of time, and parameters of interest. The targets package leverages software to detect whether inputs with "downstream" dependencies have changed since they were last processed to determine whether to spend computing resources processing the inputs. cyan_targets allows for users to define spatial areas of interest by HUC2 or geographic bounding boxes, set start and ends dates of interest, and parameters to query for in the Water Quality Portal. These data are then compiled into .csv files with certain formatting decisions made based on the initial purpose of this workflow, which was to provide CONUS data sets for approximately 60 parameters to populate the database of the CyANWeb Field Application web service.