3 About the PEcAn Book

This book serves as documentation for the PEcAn Project. It contains descriptions of topics necessary to inform a beginner and advanced user as well as requisite materials for developers. It does not contain low-level descriptions of functions within PEcAn. Our aim for this documentation is to educate you about the PEcAn software, the possibilities of its usage, and the standards,expectations, and core workflows for developers.

3.0.1 Main Topics

This book is organized around these main topics:

Basic User Guide - Brief explaination of PEcAn, how to obtain the PEcAn VM, and explanation of basic web interface functions

Intermediate Users Guide - Explanation of more advanced customizations of PEcAn from the web interface. Includes explanation of PEcAn settings file, advanced web configuration, and handling remote execution of PEcAn.

Advanced User Guide - Cmd Line - Full explanation of PEcAn, tools that are not integrated in the main workflow, and

Developer Guide - Explains what you need to know in order to contibute code to PEcAn.

Reference Materials - Reference pages containing information about models, data, and other tools

Appendix - Supplementary materials for the developer section.

3.1 How to Contribute

If you wish to contribute to this book, we greatly welcome it! The same general steps to contributing PEcAn code to the main line can be used to contribute to this book.

3.1.1 Editing the book yourself

  1. Navigate to the main PEcAn github repository: https://github.com/PecanProject/pecan and fork the repository to your github account.

  2. Use git clone on the machine your are using to create a local copy of the repository. General instructions can be found here

  3. Navigate to the book_source directory and edit the page you would like to change using any text editor. Save your files in the R markdown format (.Rmd).
    • If you are adding a new page, you must edit the _bookdown.yml file also and list your page in order for it to be properly indexed by gitbook.

  4. Within the directory book_source diectory, execute make

  5. Use git add changedfile.Rmd to stage your changes and then commit git commit -m "your message" your changes and push (git push) them to your fork.

  6. Create a pull request, using github, with a description of the changes you have made.

3.1.2 Feedback/Comments/Suggestions

We want your ideas, thoughts, comments, and suggestions! This is an open-sourced project so please feel free to reach out to us in the following ways:

Github: https://github.com/PecanProject/pecan Serving as the main hub of communication surrounding PEcAn development, check out the issues section to see what is coming down the pipeline. If there is anything you feel you can contribute to, leave a comment. ​
Slack: https://pecanproject.slack.com/ Slack serves as our day to day mode of communication. To join us in slack you will need to create an account first. This is done in 3 steps:

  1. Request an inivitation to join slack, this will be send by email to address you provided.
  2. Check your inbox for an email from Slack with subject “Rob Kooper has invited you to join a Slack workspace”. This email should have a link that you can click to join slack.
  3. When you click a webpage will open up that asks you to create an account, once that is done you can login into the slack chatrooms.

Email: pecanproj[at]gmail.com If you do not wish your communication with the team to be public, send us an email at the address above and we will get back to you as soon as possible.