Spatial groupings: Watersheds, Ecoregions, Counties

[cboettig]

One class of questions I keep getting asked about involves comparisons with various spatial tilings of the entire map: ecoregions, counties, watersheds. Users ask questions like:

• Which ecoregions/counties/watersheds has the highest/lowest level of biodiversity/carbon/social vulnerability,
• How are protections distributed over ecoregions/counties/watersheds?

I think it would be great to brainstorm ways we might approach this question, with what we can pre-calculate and what we might be able to calculate dynamically.

An added wrinkle is that most of these tiling are hierarchical -- e.g. states->counties->tracks, ecoregions->subregions etc.
In an idealized version of the tool, users could both filter to a jurisdiction of interest, and then quickly explore the distribution questions (i.e., within my state, which counties are highest in biodiversity/carbon/nature vulnerability. Or same question but state->county and county-> tract, etc).

I believe most of these are fast aggregations if we compute the spatial joins and raster zonal statistics ahead of time.