GEOSTAT courses

Location: EM room

Objective: Introduction to GRASS GIS: from history and background to statistical modules and GRASS+R
General description: The tutorial will begin with a general introduction to GRASS with a few exercises to get familiar with GRASS. Emphasis will be put on some important concepts of GRASS: locations, computational regions and vector topology. The amount of exercises will then increase from session to session, ending with GRASS – R interaction.
Required back-ground knowledge: GIS and spatial data processing, statistics.
Software / R packages required: GRASS 6.4.2+ or 6.5, R.

9:00–10:30 GRASS GIS Intro, getting started - Markus Neteler
Summary: GRASS history and background; GRASS database concept (GISDBase, Location, Mapset); computational region in GRASS; raster format intro and principles of raster processing; vector format intro and principles of vector processing; data import/export; raster/vector reprojection. Exercises: data import/export, computational regions for raster processing, vector topological cleaning.

10:30–11:00 Coffee break;

11:00–12:30 Overview of the functionality in GRASS, exercises with selected modules - Markus Neteler
Summary: GRASS command structure; 3D visualisation; scripting in GRASS; statistical modules for raster maps, vector maps, and combining raster and vector maps. Each part will be accompanied by exercises.

12:30–14:00 Lunch break;

14:00–15:30 Lecture cont'ed + GRASS GIS exercises - Markus Neteler (in collaboration with Markus Metz)
Summary: GRASS - R interaction. Some analysis and visualization will be done with the ECA&D European climate data set from 1981 - 2010 (monthly aggregates)

15:30–15:45 Coffee break;

15:45–17:00 exercises -Markus Neteler (in collaboration with Markus Metz)
Summary: exercises continued; open analysis session.

Software download:

• Course material incl. data sets download: here (updated!)
• Software:
  • Linux: your distro may offer a recent GRASS GIS package, see also here
  • MS-Windows: get the latest 6.4.svn snapshot from here (corresponds to 6.4.3)
  • Mac OSX: get the package from here
  • R: get the package from here

Literature:

• Bivand, R., Pebesma, E., Rubio, V., 2008. Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R. Use R Series, Springer, Heidelberg, 378 p.
• Neteler, M., Bowman, M.H., Landa, M. and Metz, M. (2012): GRASS GIS: a multi-purpose Open Source GIS. Environmental Modelling & Software, 31: 124-130 [DOI | PDF]
• Neteler, M., Mitasova, H., 2008. Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach, 3rd Edt. Springer, The International Series in Engineering and Computer Science: Volume 773. 406 p.
• Hall, G.B. (Ed), 2008. Open Source Approaches to Spatial Data Handling. Springer, New York. 278p.
• Rocchini, D., Neteler, M. (2012): Let the four freedoms paradigm apply to ecology. Accepted by Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 27(6): 310-31 [DOI | PDF]