burnr (version 0.4.0)

sea: Perform superposed epoch analysis.

Description

Perform superposed epoch analysis.

Usage

sea(x, event, nbefore = 6, nafter = 4, event_range = TRUE,
  n_iter = 1000)

Arguments

x

A data.frame climate reconstruction or tree-ring series with row names as years.

event

A vector of event years for superposed epoch, such as fire years, or an fhx object with a single series as produced by composite

nbefore

The number of lag years prior to the event year

nafter

The number of lag years following the event year

event_range

Logical. Constrains the time series to the time period of key events within the range of the x climate series. False uses the entire climate series, ignoring the period of key events. time series

n_iter

The number of iterations for bootstrap resampling

Value

A sea object containing, (1) a vector of event years, (2) a data.frame summary of the actual events composite, (3) a data.frame summary of the simulated events composite, (4) a data.frame summary of the departures of actual from simulated events, (5) a matrix of the actual events composite, and (6) a matrix of simulated events composite.

Details

Superposed epoch analysis (SEA) helps to evaluate fire-climate relationships in studies of tree-ring fire history. It works by compositing the values of an annual time series or climate reconstruction for the fire years provided (key) and both positive and negative lag years. Bootstrap resampling of the time series is performed to evaluate the statistical significance of each year's mean value. Users interpret the departure of the actual event year means from the simulated event year means. Note that there is no rescaling of the climate time series 'x'.

The significance of lag-year departures from the average climate condition was first noted by Baisan and Swetnam (1990) and used in an organized SEA by Swetnam (1993). Since then, the procedure has been commonly applied in fire history studies. The FORTRAN program EVENT.exe was written by Richard Holmes and Thomas Swetnam (Holmes and Swetnam 1994) to perform SEA for fire history specifically. EVENT was incorporated in the FHX2 software by Henri Grissino-Mayer. Further information about SEA can be found in the FHAES user's manual, http://help.fhaes.org/

sea was designed to replicate EVENT as closely as possible. We have tried to stay true to their implementation of SEA, although multiple versions of the analysis exist in the climate literature and for fire history. The outcome of EVENT and sea should only differ slightly in the values of the simulated events and the departures, because random draws are used. The event year and lag significance levels should match, at least in the general pattern.

We note that our implementation of sea borrows from the dplR::sea function in how it performs the bootstrap procedure, but differs in the kind of output provided for the user.

References

Baisan and Swetnam 1990, Fire history on desert mountain range: Rincon Mountain Wilderness, Arizona, U.S.A. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 20:1559-1569.

Bunn 2008, A dendrochronology program library in R (dplR), Dendrochronologia 26:115-124

Holmes and Swetnam 1994, EVENT program description

Swetnam 1993, Fire history and climate change in giant sequoia groves, Science 262:885-889.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
# Read in the Cook and Krusic (2004; The North American Drought Atlas) reconstruction
# of Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) for the Jemez Mountains area (gridpoint 133).
target_url <- paste0('http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu',
                     '/SOURCES/.LDEO/.TRL/.NADA2004',
                     '/pdsiatlashtml/pdsiwebdata/1050w_350n_133.txt')
pdsi <- read.table(target_url, header = TRUE, row.names = 1)
pdsi <- subset(pdsi, select = "RECON")

# Run SEA on Peggy Mesa (pgm) data
data(pgm)
pgm_comp <- composite(pgm)

pgm_sea <- sea(pdsi, pgm_comp)

# See basic results:
print(pgm_sea)

# Basic plot:
plot(pgm_sea)
# }