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Abstract
This contribution describes the development of a plugin for the geographic information system QGIS to interface the openModeller software package. The aim is to use openModeller to generate species’ potential distribution models for various archaeological applications (site catchment analysis, for example). Since the usage of openModeller’s command-line interface and configuration files can be a bit inconvenient, an extension of the QGIS user interface to handle these tasks, in combination with the management of the geographic data, was required. The implementation was realized in Python using PyQGIS and PyQT. The plugin, in combination with QGIS, handles the tasks of managing geographical data, data conversion, generation of configuration files required by openModeller and compilation of a project folder. The plugin proved to be very helpful with the task of compiling project datasets and configuration files for multiple instances of species occurrence datasets and the overall handling of openModeller. In addition, the plugin is easily extensible to take potential new requirements into account in the future.
Highlights
The work presented here is realized in the context of the interdisciplinary research project Collaborative Research Centre 806 (CRC8061)
OpenModeller is a cross-platform environment to carry out ecological niche modelling experiments, that was built with the motivation to provide a single expandable open source platform for ENM or species’ potential distribution modelling (SPDM) with different algorithms
This work presents a QGIS plugin we developed for this purpose and exemplary results that were accomplished using openModeller in combination with the plugin
Summary
The work presented here is realized in the context of the interdisciplinary research project Collaborative Research Centre 806 (CRC8061). The overall context of this work is the modelling of ecological niches (ENM) or species’ potential distributions (SPDM) of various faunal species for the Upper Palaeolithic (50-10 kyBP). The extensibility, cross-platform capabilities, the possibility to apply and compare multiple modelling algorithms as well as the ability to project the modelling results to environmental data of a different time slice in particular, are the reasons openModeller was picked for this purpose. The terminology of the modelling approach is explained, as well as related work concerning SPDM and the openModeller application while the focus of this contribution is on the presentation of the QGIS plugin. Explains the software used to implement the plugin and the data and modelling algorithm applied to produce the example results.
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