Spatial Information Systems

ATGIS

Clearwater Software provided contract support to Atherton Tablelands Geographical Information Services (ATGIS) from 2004 to 2009. During this time Clearwater Software was engaged in the development of interactive web-based mapping system, including the award winning website for the Northern Queensland Wildfire Mitigation Project.

DOMAIN

Guy Carpenter developed the DOMAIN modelling algorithm while working at the CSIRO Tropical Forest Research Centre. DOMAIN is commonly used to predict the distribution of plants and animals from (i) the known distribution of the target species and (ii) a set of GIS layers which are presumed to correlate to the distribution of the taxa. The layers may include things such as rainfall, temperature range and elevation.

DOMAIN was a product of my dissatisfaction with available bio-climatic modelling methods, particularly the boxcar approach popularized by the BioClim software. The boxcar approach treats each axis independently, failing to account for the important covariance between GIS layers. Consider the issue this way; if you observe a species surviving in warm-wet conditions and cool-dry conditions, you cannot assume it will also survive in warm-dry conditions or cool-wet conditions. Environmental factors are often highly covariant.

A full description of the method was published in CARPENTER, G., GILLISON, A.N. and WINTER J. (1993) DOMAIN: a flexible modelling procedure for mapping potential distributions of plants and animals. Biodiversity and Conservation 2: 667.680.

A rather old Windows implementation of DOMAIN is distributed by CIFOR.

Plant Functional Attributes

My work with Andy Gillison at CSIRO and subsequently with the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Indonesia revolved around Gillison's Plant Functional Attributes (PFA's). My contribution was to define a grammar-based approach to formalizing Gillison's PFA system, and to develop numerical techniques for PFA analysis.

The results were published in GILLISON, A. N. & CARPENTER, G. (1997) A generic plant functional attribute set and grammar for dynamic vegetation description and analysis. Functional Ecology 11 (6), 775-783.

The grammar-based approach developed for use with PFAs is based on Noam Chomsky's work on transformational grammars. An interesting feature of the numerical processes we developed is that they can be applied to analyze populations of anything that can be described with a set of discrete features, even if the features are interrelated in complex ways. Most recently (2009) this methodology has been applied to the analysis of farming practices in developing nations.

Side-Scan Sonar

During the 80's Guy Carpenter worked at both the University of Washington School of Oceanography and James Cook University Marine Geophysical Laboratory developing software to analyse side-scan sonar imagery.