History

QGIS for Environmental/Natural Resource/ Forestry Management

During QGIS hackfest the idea of an ecological toolbox has popped up, thanks mainly to Johannes Signer.
Among currently available solutions, we thought about Hawth's tools and some other Arc* plugins; other tools, like Conefor and Circuitscape, are dedicated GIS clones and could not cover all analysis requirements, therefore obliging the user to switch among different programs, that often implies different formats and consequent unuseful extra work.

See the discussion on Qgis-user mailing list for what has been said so far.

Idea: create the Toolbox into Sextante.

The actualisation of this idea needs at least 3 steps:
  • Identify the most common operations and algorithms: feel free to fill the section below
  • Consider picking up code from GRASS, R and other relevant open source program/library
  • Find a comfortable way to distribute it (customised QGIS? toolbox? separated plugins? library?)

Common operations and algorithms

  • raster comparison tools of the Map Comparison Kit (http://www.riks.nl/mck/)
  • niche modelling / habitat suitability
  • Distance sampling (http://www.ruwpa.st-and.ac.uk/distance/)
  • Animal Movement Turning angles
  • Transect & quadrat layout (systematic or random, and stratification of survey zones)
  • Mapping density and home range
  • Land Cover classification

Open source tools

Commonly used (closed or open source) solutions

Name Purpose Source Notes
Hawth's tools Swiss army knife for ArcGIS Closed Agustin Lobo lists here Hawth's tools, to find for each of them the open source equivalent.
GME - Geospatial Modelling Environment Successor of Hawth's tools Custom Interested in open source GIS integration
Conefor Quantifying the importance of habitat patches for landscape connectivity Open
Circuitscape Uses algorithms from electronic circuit theory to predict patterns of movement, gene flow, and genetic differentiation among plant and animal populations in heterogeneous landscapes Open
Diva GIS standalone GIS well suited for biodiversity data, such as the distribution of species, good raster analysis Closed Possible porting of algorithms into QGIS, or release of code as open source (Wildintellect)
ReBioMa A public biodiversity web application that support data upload, validation, visualization, and automated species distribution modeling via Maxent. Open No explicit license
Maxent Based on the maximum-entropy approach for species habitat modeling Closed
LAMOS - Landscape Modelling Shell Explore the role of different processes (such as vegetation dynamics and fire spread)in the dynamics of landscapes Closed Implemented into Simile
HydroFlow HydroFlow is OpenSource software to determine the flow and hierarchy of the network of drainage by the methods of Strahler and Shreve Open GPL
Passage Pattern Analysis, Spatial Statistics and Geographic Exegesis ? "as is"
UNICOR A species connectivity and corridor network simulator ? Public Domain?

Who's interested

  • Anne Ghisla
  • Johannes Signer
  • Agustin Lobo
  • Bram van Moorter
  • Rainer M. Krug
  • John C. Tull
  • Brent Wood (pcreso)
  • David Campbell
  • Volkan Kepoglu
  • Borys Jurgiel
  • Howard Frederick
  • Giovanni Manghi
  • Martin Jung
  • Nicolas Seoane (nicosaon)
  • Marco De Paolini
  • Luca Congedo
  • Will Gardner
  • add yourself here