Some Coveted Programming Skills

To follow-up on an earlier post I wrote this year about GIS Skills, I recently read a story in Readwrite Enterprise outlining 15 programming skills most coveted by employers (http://readwrite.com/2013/04/09/15-programming-skills-most-coveted-by-employers). While their story was aimed at the development community, two of the 15 skills outlined in their story are definitely needed by GIS Analysts and...

A Maxent Script Tool for ArcGIS

As part of my PhD research at the University of Arizona where I study biogeography, biodiversity and macroecology, I have been part of a group looking at large-scale biodiversity questions for New World plants. In this role, I have been responsible for generating many species distribution models using Stephen Phillip's Maxent software (and R with the Dismo...

Speedy Attribute Editing with a Custom ArcMap Add-In

One of my colleagues, TerraSystems Southwest, is assisting The Nature Conservancy in Tucson with the Sonoran Desert Disturbed Lands Analysis project. As part of their scope of work, they were asked to assess the level and type of land disturbance for over 100,000 1-square mile hexagons covering the Sonoran Desert. As you might expect, editing the attributes...

Mobile Apps for Naturalists

Since nearly everyone carries a smartphone these days, we can now carry a small library worth of field guides with us inside our phones so we never miss an opportunity to identify an interesting organism. With this in mind, here are a few mobile applications that are today's field ecologist or naturalist should definitely consider having...