GeoEco 0.6

Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools

Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools (MGET), also known as the GeoEco Python package, is an open source geoprocessing toolbox designed for coastal and marine researchers and GIS analysts who work with spatially-explicit ecological and oceanographic data in scientific or management workflows. MGET includes over 150 tools useful for a variety of tasks, such as converting oceanographic data to ArcGIS formats, identifying fronts in sea surface temperature images, fitting and evaluating statistical models such as GAMs and GLMs by integrating ArcGIS with the R statistics program, analyzing coral reef connectivity by simulating hydrodynamic larval dispersal, and building grids that summarize fishing effort, CPUE and other statistics. Currently under development are tools for identifying rings and eddy cores in sea surface height images, for analyzing connectivity networks, for estimating fishing effort when no effort data are available, for predicting hard bottom habitat from coarse grain bathymetry, and much more.

Although “Marine” is the first word in the title, many of the tools are not specific to marine problems. You may find these tools useful in a variety of situations.

Key Features

• Free, open-source software written in Python, R, MATLAB, and C++

• Distributed as a self-installing setup program, for easy installation

• Each “tool” is a software subroutine designed to be invoked programmatically

• For easy execution from many environments, each tool is exposed from:

  • A Python class

  • A dual-interface Microsoft COM class (on Windows)

  • An ArcGIS geoprocessing toolbox

• Many tools have both single-input and multi-input (batch processing) implementations

• All tools include full documentation, one version tailored to Python programmers and another to ArcGIS users

• A verbose logging system eases troubleshooting of difficult failures

• All tools are written to maximize reliability, interoperability and performance

• Many tools do not require Windows or ArcGIS; we hope to issue non-Windows releases in the future

Download and More Information

Visit our home page http://code.env.duke.edu/projects/mget/