Weekly resource round-up: Monday 10th May

This week’s handy things:

1. The latest issue of Methods in Ecology and Evolution is available online, and features some interesting stats articles (‘Do not log-transform count data’ for example).
2. Interesting paper on free and open-source geospatial tools for landscape ecology, previously posted about here.
3. This blog post features some useful tips for academic poster design.
4. A few conference abstract deadlines are coming up:
   1. GFOE 40^th Anniversary Meeting, Giessen, Germany: 25^th May
   2. Organic Matter Stabilisation and Ecosystem Functions, Presqu’île de Giens, France: 15^th May
   3. BES Annual Meeting, Leeds: 10^th May (today!)

Free software for landscape ecology

Ecological Informatics journal

Last year Stefan Steiniger and Geoffrey Hay published an interesting article in Ecological Informatics: Free and open source geographic information tools for landscape ecology. They introduce the concepts of free, and open-source, software and provide examples of the kinds of spatiallandscape ecology problems that can be tackled using a variety of the tools available. I think the best bits are the several tables, which provide links to many of the free GIS packages available.

R has several spatial analysis packages

The ever-expanding open-source geospatial community provides an interesting alternative to the industry heavyweight, ESRI, who plan to release the latest version of their ArcGIS package later this year. Perhaps this partly explains the unusual enthusiasm with which the open-source geospatial movement is promoted.

James Cheshire’s post on free GIS resources makes an interesting companion to this post.