rOpenSci package or resource used*
What did you do?
As a plant pathologist, I am interested in improving the characterisation of environmental influences on pathogen infection. This piqued my interest if there are any R packages that estimate leaf temperatures and/or humidity from ambient weather variables. A cursory search led me to the tealeaves.
However, the tealeaves package requires additional parameters which are not logged by common weather stations, such as short wave solar radiation and albedo. However, I was aware that nasapower provides all the weather inputs required on a 0.5 degree grid from satellite remote sensing.
By using both these packages together I could obtain estimates of leaf temperatures for anywhere in the world.
URL for the use case
Open Plant Pathology: Estimating leaf temperatures for spatial epidemiology
Image
Sector
academic
Field(s) of application
ecology, phytology, epidemiology, plant pathology