# Introduction to nhdplusTools

#### dblodgett@usgs.gov

The nhdplusTools package contains a wide range of hydrographic data utilities. Many are globally-applicable hydrographic data manipulation and processing tools. Others are specific to a U.S. context, focused on particular US datasets and sources.

Detailed documentation of all the package functions can be found at the Reference page.

For data discovery and access in a U.S. context, start with the US Data vignette `vignette("US_data")`.

For globally applicable functions, start with the advanced network attributes vignette `vignette("advanced_network")`.

Please consider registering issues and feature suggestions on github.

Installation

For the latest CRAN release of nhdplusTools, use:

    # install.packages("nhdplusTools")

The easiest way to install the latest `nhdplusTools` development is with the `remotes` package like this:

    # install.packages("remotes")
    # remotes::install_github("usgs-r/nhdplusTools")

The `nhdplusTools` package is intended to provide a reusable set of tools to subset, relate data to, and rebuild attributes for hydrography data. It implements a data model consistent with both the NHDPlus and HY_Features. The package aims to provide a set of tools with minimal dependencies that can be used to build workflows using NHDPlus data-model data.

The package has three types of functionality presented in the following vegnettes:

1. Data access in the U.S. context: `vignette("US_data")`
2. Indexing data to hydrography: `vignette("indexing")`
3. Hydrographic network attributes: `vignette("advanced_network")`

Two other vignette articles are available for the package.

1. Working with NHDPlusHR: `vignette("nhdplushr")`
2. Plotting NHDPlus data: `vignette("plot_nhdplus")`

Thanks for taking the time to read the package documentation. If you see anything that looks wrong or could be better, please consider opening an issue or a pull request in github!