Integrating GRASS GIS and Jupyter Notebooks to facilitate advanced geospatial modeling education

Open education materials are critical for the advancement of open science and the development of open-source soft-ware. These accessible and transparent materials provide an important pathway for sharing both standard geospa-tial analysis workflows and advanced research methods. Computational notebooks allow users to share live code with in-line visualizations and narrative text, making them a powerful interactive teaching tool for geospatial analyt-ics. Specifically, Jupyter Notebooks are quickly becoming a standard format in open education. In this article, we intro-duce a new GRASS GIS package, grass.jupyter, that enhances the existing GRASS Python API to allow Jupyter Notebook users to easily manage and visualize GRASS data including spatiotemporal datasets. While there are many Python-based geospatial libraries available for use in Jupyter Notebooks, GRASS GIS has extensive geospatial functionality including support for multi-temporal analysis and dynamic simulations, making it a powerful teaching tool for advanced geospatial analytics. We discuss the devel-opment of grass.jupyter and demonstrate how the package facilitates teaching open-source geospatial mode-ling with a collection of Jupyter Notebooks designed for a graduate-level geospatial modeling course. The open educa-tion notebooks feature spatiotemporal data visualizations, hydrologic modeling, and spread simulations such as the spread of invasive species and urban growthpublishedVersio

Spatial ecological complexity measures in GRASS GIS

Good estimates of ecosystem complexity are essential for a number of ecological tasks: from biodiversity estimation, to forest structure variable retrieval, to feature extraction by edge detection and generation of multifractal surface as neutral models for e.g. feature change assessment. Hence, measuring ecological complexity over space becomes crucial in macroecology and geography. Many geospatial tools have been advocated in spatial ecology to estimate ecosystem complexity and its changes over space and time. Among these tools, free and open source options especially offer opportunities to guarantee the robustness of algorithms and reproducibility. In this paper we will summarize the most straightforward measures of spatial complexity available in the Free and Open Source Software GRASS GIS, relating them to key ecological patterns and processes

Implementation of SQLite database support in program gama-local

The program gama-local is a part of GNU Gama project and allows adjustment of local geodetic networks. Before realization of this project the program gama-local supported only XML as an input. I designed and implemented support for the SQLite database and thanks to this extension gama-local can read input data from the SQLite database. This article is focused on the specifics of the use of callback functions in C++ using the native SQLite C/C++ Application Programming Interface. The article provides solution to safe calling of callback functions written in C++. Callback functions are called from C library and C library itself is used by C++ program. Provided solution combines several programing techniques which are described in detail, so this article can serve as a cookbook even for beginner programmers.  This project was accomplished within my bachelor thesis

grass-tangible-landscape

Tangible geospatial modeling and visualization system integrated with GRASS GI

Website

Website for Tangible Landscap

Redesigning Graphical User Interface of Open-Source Geospatial Software in a Community-Driven Way: A Case Study of GRASS GIS

Learning to use geographic information system (GIS) software effectively may be intimidating due to the extensive range of features it offers. The GRASS GIS software, in particular, presents additional challenges for first-time users in terms of its complex startup procedure and unique terminology associated with its data structure. On the other hand, a substantial part of the GRASS user community including us as developers recognized and embraced the advantages of the current approach. Given the controversial nature of the whole issue, we decided to actively involve regular users by conducting several formal surveys and by performing usability testing. Throughout this process, we discovered that resolving specific software issues through pure user-centered design is not always feasible, particularly in the context of open-source scientific software where the boundary between users and developers is very fuzzy. To address this challenge, we adopted the user-centered methodology tailored to the requirements of open-source scientific software development, which we refer to as community-driven design. This paper describes the community-driven redesigning process on the GRASS GIS case study and sets a foundation for applying community-driven design in other open-source scientific projects by providing insights into effective software development practices driven by the needs and input of the project’s community

Tangible modeling with open source GIS

This book presents a new type of modeling environment where users interact with geospatial simulations using 3D physical models of studied landscapes. Multiple users can alter the physical model by hand during scanning, thereby providing input for simulation of geophysical processes in this setting. The authors have developed innovative techniques and software that couple this hardware with open source GRASS GIS, making the system instantly applicable to a wide range of modeling and design problems. Since no other literature on this topic is available, this Book fills a gap for this new technology that continues to grow. Tangible Modeling with Open Source GIS will appeal to advanced-level students studying geospatial science, computer science and earth science such as landscape architecture and natural resources. It will also benefit researchers and professionals working in geospatial modeling applications, computer graphics, hazard risk management, hydrology, solar energy, coastal and fluvial flooding, fire spread, landscape, park design and computer games