Geospatial analysis for conservation: Applications with open-source software in the Natural Parks of Barcelona

We describe some applications of geospatial analysis in which open-source software has been prevalent, with the aim of presenting examples of operational use and discussing past and current limitations. The examples are extracted from a sequence of projects carried out in Natural Parks of the Province of Barcelona (Catalonia, NE Spain), including the use of calibrated satellite vegetation index to monitor recovery after fire, multi-criteria analysis to rank abandoned fields for restoration, generalization of vegetation maps using a double-criteria hierarchical clustering, and planning and initial evaluation of aerial campaigns with a small remote-controlled aerial vehicle. Our use of open-source software steadily increased through this sequence of projects, with the R language and environment for statistical computing occupying a central position in our set of tools, but our applications also made use of proprietary software. © Società Italiana di Fotogrammetria e Topografia (SIFET) 2012.