Overview
The promise of GIS has always been that it would allow us to obtain better answers to our questions. But this is only possible if we have tools that allows us to perform rigorous quantitative analyses designed for spatial data. The Geospatial Modelling Environment (GME) is a platform designed to help to facilitate rigorous spatial analysis and modelling.
GME provides you with a suite of analysis and modelling tools, ranging from small 'building blocks' that you can use to construct a sophisticated work-flow, to completely self-contained analysis programs. It also uses the extraordinarily powerful open source software R as the statistical engine to drive some of the analysis tools. One of the many strengths of R is that it is open source, completely transparent and well documented: important characteristics for any scientific analytical software.
It incorporates most of the functionality of its predecessor, HawthsTools, but with some important improvements. It has a greater range of analysis and modelling tools, supports batch processing, offers new graphing functionality, automatically records work-flows for future reference, supports geodatabases, and can be called programatically.
The GME is currently at the beta version stage and therefore contains only some of the functionality it will ultimately contain. For instance, most of the tools currently implemented are GIS tools. The next phase of development will focus primarily on the statistical and modelling tools. However, I trust that many people will find even this subset of tools quite useful.
I am always grateful for suggestions about how to improve the tools even if I do not always have time to personally respond to every email I receive. Thank you in advance for your suggestions (email: hawthorne@spatialecology.com).
If you find this software useful please consider providing financial support for this project.