Software combination for the analysis of water resources
Article by Juan Antonio Pascual in the journal "Science of the Total Environment"
The combination of programs of different nature for the geographical analysis of water resources is already common, for example. An example of the above mentioned is the spatial characterization of pollutants of agricultural origin in the Júcar River, which combines techniques for extracting spatial information with ARCGIS, elaboration of tabulated summaries and obtaining simple statistical inferences with Microsoft Office and the multivariate analysis of principal components with SPSS, all of them under commercial license.
However, an analytical design similar to that proposed in the previous example is also possible using open access programs. Precisely, the manual to evaluate the role that coastal and marine ecosystems play in mitigating the erosion of beaches, prepared in the framework of the Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Methodology Development Project (RIVAMP), proposes a systematic use of free programs combining QGIS, GIS equivalent to ARCGIS; The suite LibreOffice, similar to Microsoft Office and Tanagra, a statistical analysis program similar to SPSS, although somewhat less sophisticated.
