The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by METANET, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]metanet.ch.

Pull stream network associated with a waterbody catchment

Jemma Stachelek

2026-09-09

The goal of this vignette is to demonstrate how to pull the stream network associated with a waterbody catchment. We will use the extract_network function to accomplish this task using the built-in mendota dataset.

library(nhdR)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(sf)

Let’s start by pulling the coordinates associated with Lake Mendota, which will be the largest object (by area) in the waterbody object.

data(mendota)

largest_waterbody <- which.max(st_area(mendota$sp$NHDWaterbody))
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
mendota_lake      <- mendota$sp$NHDWaterbody[largest_waterbody, ]
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
mendota_lake      <- st_transform(mendota_lake, crs = 4326)
mendota_centroid  <- st_coordinates(st_centroid(mendota_lake))

Next, we can use the extract_network function to pull the stream network associated with Lake Mendota. Notice that we have set the maxsteps parameter to Inf. If the network is anticipated to be very large it can be a good idea to set this to a discrete (lower) number to avoid returning very large lines objects.

mendota_network <- extract_network(lon = mendota_centroid[1],
  lat = mendota_centroid[2],
  maxsteps = Inf)

Finally, we compare the stream network from a geometric buffer around Lake Mendota against the output of extract_network to make sure everything is working properly.

ggplot() +
  geom_sf(data = mendota$sp$NHDFlowLine) +
  geom_sf(data = mendota_lake, fill = "cyan") +
  geom_sf(data = mendota_network, color = "blue")
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()
#> old-style crs object detected; please recreate object with a recent sf::st_crs()

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.