Author Archives: pvanb

About pvanb

I am a tropical forest ecologist with a focus on spatial and temporal patterns and processes at population and ecosystem level. I am furthermore very interested in issues related to conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and natural resources under current and future climates. I have worked in the Middle East (Syria and Lebanon) and South America (Brazil) and in Eastern Africa (Kenya).

Rounding of floating numbers in GRASS GIS r.mapcalc

The GRASS GIS development team keeps on introducing new features and enhancements to GRASS 7.0. One of the latest examples is the enhancement of the round() function in r.mapcalc. Previously this function would always returns an integer, regardless of its … Continue reading

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Building QGIS on Ubuntu 13.04

Always one of those dreaded moments after updating Ubuntu, to 13.04 this time. Will QGIS compile properly. Not as it turned out, but the solutions were easy and quick, thanks to posts on nyalldawson.net and boringnerdystuff. Ubuntu 13.04 defaults to … Continue reading

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Zotero 4.0 is out

My reference manager of choice, Zotero, just released an update, Zotero 4.0, with loads of new functionality. For the highlights, see here.

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What if Google decides to discontinue Google Scholar?

Since Google discontinued Google reader I have always been wondering; what if they decide to stop with Google Scholar? If you are lucky enough to have access to an university library, you should be fine. But there are also a … Continue reading

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GRASS gis scripts to import data from Worldclim, CSFR and PISM

I just came across these GRASS GIS scripts by Julien Seguinot to import multiple files from the WorldClim current climate dataset, the  Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CSFR) data and some other reanalysis data sets. Furthermore, there is a script (r.in.pism) … Continue reading

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Some cool new features in the upcoming QGIS 2.0

The upcoming QGIS 2.0 will have some really cool and useful new features. Check for example out the latest blog posts by Anita Graser aka Underdark, where she takes you on a tour of all the new features of the … Continue reading

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A plugin to export layers in GIMP file to single pdf file

A while back I wrote about two possible ways to export multiple layers in GIMP to one pdf file using third-party tools. But it turns out there is an much easier solution as Nevar pointed out in the comments on … Continue reading

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Update of the r.forestfrag addon for GRASS GIS

Some time ago I came across this post from Sylla Consult about a script to calculate forest fragmentation index suggested by Riitters et al. (2000). Obviously, it can be used for any land cover type, so perhaps landscape fragmentation index … Continue reading

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Presentation of map query result improved in GRASS 7.0

GRASS GIS (version 6.4, and up to recently 7.0 too) would present map query results in the command console. I have never really got used to it though. Often when I needed to query some points on the map, I … Continue reading

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Sharing or exporting sub-sections of a ZIM notebook

I use ZIM desktop wiki to keep all kind of notes. Sometimes I want to share my notes. This is easy enough when I want to share the whole notebook. I simply send the whole folder containing the ZIM notebook … Continue reading

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