A user-friendly PC-based GIS for forest entomology: an attempt to combine existing software

We present a combination of existing software which should facilitate the use of GIS by forest entomologists. The use of existing GIS by ecologists who want to take advantage of the spatial component of their analyses is often hindered by the difficulty of use and cost of such tools. Moreover, it might be useful to have a system which can be carried to remote locations where access to a mainframe computer or powerful workstations is unavailable. It is now possible to have a good system running on a single personal computer due to the increasing power and the low cost of this type of hardware. We have gathered programs characterised by their simplicity, low cost, and performances. IDRISI is a simple and inexpensive GIS which has a simple file structure that allows the user to create his/her own analysis scripts with basic knowledge in computer science. VARIOWIN is a geostatistical package which performs exploratory variography and 2D modelling. SURFER is a surface mapping system able to create and to display grids using several methods of spatial interpolations including two dimensional anisotropic kriging. FRAGSTATS is a program which performs landscape analyses and finally, COREL DRAW is a vector-oriented package that can be used for output of both bitmap and vector output. These programs were not designed to work together and problems may occur due to the heterogeneous nature of the system. Conversion file difficulties were encountered and we were faced with the complexity of using different programs to perform one analysis sequence. An additional module is being developed to solve these problems and the whole system should be able to manage data, analyze their spatial component and display map output in a simple and user-friendly way.