Commercial software

ESRI's ArcGIS is used in the majority of the program's course work. This software package is the dominant commercial leader in geographical information systems. A site license is available to Duke University students and staff through Duke OIT. Those within the Nicholas School can consult the Nicholas School IT for distribution of the software.

In-House Tools

Software tools have moved to the The Marine Geospatial Ecology Laboratory (MGEL) web site.

Update (Oct 10, 2008):  ArcRstats has been folded into the Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools (MGET).  

ArcRstats was originally developed principally by Ben Best with the notion of bridging the statistical and graphical abilities of the open-source R statistical software with the geoprocessing capabilities of ESRI ArcGIS.  More specifically code was written to implement species distribution modeling techniques, including classification and regression (CART), generalized linear models (GLM) and generalized additive models (GAM).  This set of routines was also referred to as HabMod, short for habitat modeling.

Then ConnMod, a connectivity modeler toolbox, was added to HabMod.  The ConnMod package was designed to abstract a raster cost accumulation surface moving away from patches of habitat in order to construct a network of connectivity.

Here are the originally posted files for archival purposes:

• download (version 0.6, 2005-08-02) - has GLM, CART, GAM 
• download (version 0.7, 2006-06-27) - has Habitat Modeler (GLM only just yet) and Connectivity Modeler 
• talk and poster given at the Society for Conservation Biology 2006-06-27

While there has been much interest in these types of analysis, the files above are not supported.  Instead, we've migrated the HabMod (GLM, GAM, CART) capabilities into the robust MGET package maintained by Jason Roberts, which adds robust geoprocessor wrapping, error trapping, documentation and stability to these modeling processes.  ConnMod is tentatively slated for incorporation into MGET for 2009.  All future development will occur in MGET. If you have any questions, please contact Ben Best (bbest@duke.edu) and Jason Roberts (jason.roberts@duke.edu).