Naming Conventions

[lauren-herbine]

After highlighting the struggles with our current naming convention with @shelbysawyer (see part of this discussion) and a conversation with @joewheaton , we decided we needed to come up with a naming convention that can be more universally applied to any metrics we currently have or will have in the future and to any tool or application that uses our sample frame structure.

Proposals:

Analysis Windows

To begin with, Analysis Windows will be described in multiples of DGOs. Instead of saying a "400 meter analysis window" or even, "we looked upstream 600 meters and downstream 600 meters," we will instead use an odd-number DGO naming system:

01xDGO, 03xDGO, 05xDG0, 07xDGO, etc.

An 01xDGO is just the DGO that is centered around the IGO in question.
An 03xDGO is the central DGO plus the one upstream and the one downstream.
An 05xDGO is the central DGO plus the two upstream and the two downstream.

This convention helps us avoid using distance (meter) nomenclature when describing analysis windows. This 1) means this convention is universal across all IGO distances (which are based on stream size), and 2) avoids the difference between an analysis window and a search window, which we were previously mixing up.

Metric nomenclature

More to come on this, but it will likely involve prefixes and suffixes which will describe whether the metric is calculated at the IGO scale, DGO scale, is a channel or riverscape value, etc.