Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools: An integrated framework for ecological geoprocessing with ArcGIS, Python, R, MATLAB, and C++

With the arrival of GPS, satellite remote sensing, and personal computers, the last two decades have witnessed rapid advances in the field of spatially-explicit marine ecological modeling. But with this innovation has come complexity. To keep up, ecologists must master multiple specialized software packages, such as ArcGIS for display and manipulation of geospatial data, R for statistical analysis, and MATLAB for matrix processing. This requires a costly investment of time and energy learning computer programming, a high hurdle for many ecologists. To provide easier access to advanced analytic methods, we developed Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools (MGET), an extensible collection of powerful, easy-to-use, open-source geoprocessing tools that ecologists can invoke from ArcGIS without resorting to computer programming. Internally, MGET integrates Python, R, MATLAB, and Cþþ, bringing the power of these specialized platforms to tool developers without requiring developers to orchestrate the interoperability