Feature suggestion: burning features into DEM

[jennwuu]

Cool watershed delineation tool!

I was wondering if you're planning to add tools to manipulate DEM in the future. I think it would be neat if you could burn culvert (polyline) features or raise building elevations (polygon) into the DEM. I would be curious to see the delineation after modifications on the DEM.

[mdbartos]

Hi Jenn,

That's a great idea. I've thought about it, but I'm not sure what the "right" way to burn or raise features is. For instance: how much should the elevation be raised/lowered? Should there be a spatial decay around the "burn" lines that smooth the transition from hillslope to channel? If so, how do you define the decay envelope? etc.

If you know of any papers or resources describing/comparing methods for burning DEMs, that would be awesome.

In any case, I could post a notebook showing how to burn features into DEMs with pysheds. It can be done with existing methods pretty quickly.

[mdbartos]

Hi @jennwuu

I added a notebook here showing a couple different ways to burn a DEM: https://github.com/mdbartos/pysheds/blob/master/recipes/burn_dem.ipynb

[jennwuu]

Thanks! @mdbartos

I'm not sure on the right way of burning/raising features, but I found this really interesting paper that compares different methods of burning DEM (The Practice of Burning DEM revisited by John B. Lindsay). But I haven't had the time to read it in details. I think ArcHydro also has burning functionality, and I think they use AGREE (http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/gishydro/ferdi/research/agree/agree.html) method but I'm not too familiar with it either.