Advantages of open-source GIS to improve spatial environmental modelling

Spatial heterogeneity is a source of complexity in environmental models, but can also be an important part of landscape dynamics and our understanding of environmental processes. The majority of our knowledge of environmental processes to date has been acquired from relatively small plot-based experiments. Recently there has been a growing recognition that in order to apply this knowledge to regional management issues, we need to understand how the processes scale and interact across landscapes of varying sizes and complexities. GIS can be important in this research, qualified by the caution that many programs constrain landscape representation to a particular view, whereas complex environmental models require flexible combinations of representations.