I guess I misunderstood. If that is the case, then both Isaac and I agree 100%. 
The only thing is that, IIRC, there was talk awhile back about making MFD a 
flag. If so, we'll have to deal with that in the script. Maybe we can use 
g.version to ID grass 6.4 and add the flag.

Michael
____________________
C. Michael Barton
Director, Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity 
Professor of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Arizona State University

voice:  480-965-6262 (SHESC), 480-727-9746 (CSDC)
fax:          480-965-7671 (SHESC),  480-727-0709 (CSDC)
www: www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton, http://csdc.asu.edu










On Apr 28, 2010, at 5:51 PM, Helena Mitasova wrote:

> I think what Markus M was trying to say is that there is a need to release 
> GRASS64 
> with the new r.watershed (currently available only in GRASS65) that is far 
> superior than r.watershed that is in the release.
> We tested the new r.watershed quite a bit here and so far haven't found any 
> problem,
> which of-course does not guarantee that it is completely bug-free, but I 
> would like to hear from others
> (Glynn, Hamish, Scott, Markus N. and others) whether it would be sensible to 
> release
> GRASS64 with the new r.watershed. It would certainly make my life easier.
> 
> Helena 
> 
> On Apr 28, 2010, at 4:48 PM, Michael Barton wrote:
> 
>> The reality is that this kind of modeling works well and is accurate for the 
>> new MFD routine in r.watershed but does not work nearly as well with 
>> r.terraflow or with SFD in r.watershed. 
>> 
>> Helena originally proposed this for r.flow, which is how we started out 
>> several years ago. However, as we developed this modeling script, we learned 
>> that a full hydrology model worked better than the flow lines information 
>> generated by r.flow. So we switched to r.terraflow. However, the routines of 
>> r.terraflow produced numerous 'artifacts' in the way of anomalous spikes and 
>> pits that could self-amplify over multiple iterations. We used smoothing 
>> routines to get rid of these. This worked OK, but affected both accuracy of 
>> estimating erosion/deposition and the speed of calculation (median smoothers 
>> take awhile to run). We have a paper coming out that uses this version of 
>> r.landscape.evol (the previous version that is still in addons and 
>> downloadable). The old version does what it can to work around the 
>> limitations of the watershed routines that are now standard in GRASS 6.4
>> 
>> Running with the new r.watershed and MFD, however, does not create the kind 
>> of artifacts we saw with r.terraflow and does not require post facto 
>> smoothing. This makes it much faster and more accurate in its 
>> erosion/deposition estimates. Also, the smoothing never was able to 
>> completely eliminate the terraflow artifacts, but these simply don't exist 
>> with r.watershed and MFD. I guess I don't see the point of dumbing down the 
>> new version of the script to work with GRASS 
>> 
>> ____________________
>> C. Michael Barton
>> Director, Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity 
>> Professor of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
>> Arizona State University
>> 
>> voice:       480-965-6262 (SHESC), 480-727-9746 (CSDC)
>> fax:          480-965-7671 (SHESC),  480-727-0709 (CSDC)
>> www: www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton, http://csdc.asu.edu
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Apr 28, 2010, at 12:02 PM, Isaac Ullah wrote:
>> 
>>>   I suppose that is true from a programmatic point of view, but from 
>>> scientific point of view, the fact is that MFD makes the module so much 
>>> more useful that it's pointless to run it with r.terraflow (or SFD 
>>> r.watershed). Actually, I imagine that including the flag to run 
>>> r.landscape.evol.py with SFD terraflo/r.watershed is actually being 
>>> disingenuous, as I'm not even sure that the stream erosion equation can 
>>> even make valid output using SFD (I need to test this, but my feeling is 
>>> that it will produce overly-large estimates). 
>>> 
>>>    I guess that means, then, that I am advocating for backporting of 6.5 
>>> version of r.watershed to 6.4. Why put out the next stable version of GRASS 
>>> with clearly inferior capabilities? This IMO is simple guaranteeing the 
>>> quick obsolescence of the stable GRASS version for anyone actually 
>>> interested in doing state-of-the-art, cutting-edge, robust research with 
>>> it. It would make much more sense to me (as a scientist who uses GIS as a 
>>> tool) to include the best available version of modules in a new release. I 
>>> understand that one does not want to "break" any dependencies (and thus one 
>>> should generally try to avoid changing the number/arrangement of module 
>>> inputs), but surely this can be done for situations where the benefits so 
>>> greatly outweigh these costs? I imagine that only myself and perhaps a few 
>>> other scripters will have dependencies on r.watershed, and we can easily 
>>> amend our scripts to be compatible...
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> 
>>> Isaac
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Markus Metz 
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Isaac Ullah wrote:
>>>> Yes, this is certainly true. We have kept backwards compatibility with a
>>>> flag to use r.terraflow if the user has GRASS 6.4 or less.
>>> 
>>> GRASS 6.4 is the next stable release for some time to come, thus new
>>> addons for GRASS 6.x should IMHO be tailored for 6.4. Either you
>>> advocate the backporting of the 6.5 version of r.watershed to 6.4 ;-)
>>> or you make r.terraflow the default, with a flag indicating to use
>>> r.watershed.
>>> 
>>> Anyway, IMHO, newly updated addons should run in 6.4 with the default 
>>> settings.
>>> 
>>> Markus M
>>> 
>>>> 
>>> Markus Metz wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Isaac Ullah wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> [The new "r.landscape.evol.py"] takes advantage of the advanced MFD flow
>>>>>> routing capabilities of the newly
>>>>>> updated r.watershed module, which produced more accurate stream
>>>>>> networks,
>>>>>> and flow accumulation values.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Nice, but "r.landscape.evol.py" works only with the GRASS 6.5 version
>>>>> of r.watershed, otherwise
>>>>> r.terraflow must be used. Contrary to the 6.5 version, the 6.4 version
>>>>> of r.watershed only supports SFD (D8) and only integer DEMs, floating
>>>>> point DEMs are truncated to integer(, and it's slower and uses more
>>>>> memory).
>>>>> 
>>>>> Markus M
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Isaac I Ullah, M.A.
>>>> 
>>>> Archaeology PhD Candidate,
>>>> ASU School of Evolution and Social Change
>>>> 
>>>> Research Assistant,
>>>> Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics Project
>>>> ***************************************************
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.public.asu.edu/~iullah
>>>> ***************************************************
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Isaac I Ullah, M.A.
>>> 
>>> Archaeology PhD Candidate,
>>> ASU School of Evolution and Social Change
>>> 
>>> Research Assistant,
>>> Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics Project
>>> ***************************************************
>>> [email protected]
>>> [email protected]
>>> 
>>> http://www.public.asu.edu/~iullah
>>> ***************************************************
>> 
> 

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