Suggestions to make metrics more searchable

[michaeldumelle]

It would be really helpful to include some helper functions that make metrics more searchable and usable within R. There are so many metrics at different scales (which is amazing!) that it can be overwhelming to find what is needed. Something like:

sc_get_metric_names(
    type = "climate",
    aoi = "watershed",
    source = "StreamCat",
    year = NULL,
    ....
)

• type : different "types" of variables (e.g., climate, geologic, anthropogenic, other, etc.)
• aoi: area of interest (catchment, watershed, etc)
• source: source, either StreamCat or NLCD
• year: year, relevant if source = "NLCD"
• ...: Other arugments if relevant like state, region, etc.

Output could be a data frame (or tibble) and look something like:

    name        metric       aoi    source     type
1 name-1   temperature watershed StreamCat  climate
2 name-2 precipitation watershed StreamCat  climate

Vector arguments could be applied to the function, yielding something like

sc_get_metric_names(
    type = c("climate", "geologic"),
    aoi = c("watershed", "catchment"),
    source = "StreamCat",
    year = NULL,
    ....
)

    name        metric       aoi    source     type
1 name-1   temperature watershed StreamCat  climate
2 name-2 precipitation watershed StreamCat  climate
3 name-3   temperature catchment StreamCat  climate
4 name-4 precipitation catchment StreamCat  climate
5 name-5 calcium_oxide watershed StreamCat geologic
6 name-6 calcium_oxide catchment StreamCat geologic