Mapping the distribution of the White-tailed deer in Minnesota
Using multi-criteria analysis and spatial disagregation in GRASS GIS
Welcome
In this tutorial, you will create a habitat suitability map of the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in Minnesota, USA. You do this by combining information about the habitat preferences of the white-tailed deer and existing coarse scale data of deer densities.
The tutorial aims to introduce some common and perhaps some less common functions and techniques you can use to carry out a simple multi-criteria analysis in GRASS GIS.
For those not familiar with GRASS GIS, it offers a wide range of tools for terrain and ecosystem modeling, hydrology, management, and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It comes with a temporal framework for advanced time series processing and a Python API for rapid geospatial programming. Read more here…
This tutorial provides a step-by-step explanation of the analysis, with code you can run from the command line or as a Python script. The functions can also be invoked from the GUI menu or Tools tab if you prefer that. For QGIS users, note that most grass functions used in this tutorial are also available in QGIS. If you are more familiar with ArcGIS, check out the page GRASS GIS for ArcGIS users to get a grasp of the main GRASS GIS concepts you should know about.