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Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools
Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools (MGET), also known as the GeoEco Python package, is an open source geoprocessing toolbox designed for coastal and marine researchers and GIS analysts who work with spatially-explicit ecological and oceanographic data in scientific or management workflows. MGET includes over 250 tools useful for a variety of tasks, such as downloading popular oceanographic datasets in GIS-compatible formats, identifying fronts and eddies in satellite images, building statistical habitat models from species observations and creating habitat maps, modeling biological connectivity by simulating hydrodynamic larval dispersal, and building grids that summarize fishing effort, CPUE and other statistics. Currently under development are tools for analyzing connectivity networks, for estimating fishing effort when no effort data are available, for predicting hard bottom habitat from coarse grain bathymetry, and much more.
Although much of MGET is written to be platform independent, the current version is only packaged for installation on Microsoft Windows (XP or later). Many tools also require ArcGIS Desktop 9.1 or later.
MGET in ArcGIS
In ArcGIS, MGET appears in the ArcToolbox window. You can browse the available tools below. Click the 
icons to drill into the toolbox. Each 
icon represents a tool. Click on it to view its documentation.
Invoking MGET From Code
Much of MGET is written in Python so it is the easiest language to call MGET from, but MGET is designed to be interoperable and can be called from many other programming languages as well.
Example Scenarios
Here are a few examples of how you can use MGET:
- Converting HDFs to ArcGIS rasters
- Converting MODIS HDFs with sinusoidal projections to ArcGIS raster format
- Building an archive of popular oceanographic products in ArcGIS raster format
- Sampling time series rasters
- Modeling species habitat with environmental predictor variables - includes downloadable example and video-recorded presentation
- Downloading species observations from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) with the DiGIR protocol
- Calculating species diversity index grids from species presence points
This list does not come close to illustrating all of MGET's capabilities. We are currently overhauling the examples and hope to provide more complete list soon. If you have any questions about whether MGET can help with your scenario, please email us (see instructions below).
Project Status
19-Jul-11 - MGET 0.8 alpha 27 is released. So far in MGET 0.8, we have added tools for downloading, interpolating, and creating climatologies of a number of popular oceanographic products, including the NASA GSFC OceanColor Level 3 Standard Mapped Images (SMI), the 4km AVHRR Pathfinder Version 5 SST dataset published by NOAA NODC, the MODIS Level 3 SST images distributed by NASA PO.DAAC, the HYCOM + NCODA Gulf of Mexico 1/25° Gulf of Mexico Analysis (GOMl0.04), the HYCOM + NCODA Global 1/12° Analysis (GLBa0.08), and the Pacific ROMS-CoSiNE 4D ocean model published by the University of Maine Ocean Modeling Group. We also rewrote the tools for downloading Aviso sea surface height, geostrophic currents, significant wave height, and sea wind speed modulus using MGET's new grid processing architecture, added corresponding tools for interpolation and creating climatologies, and added a tool for detecting eddies in SSH images with the Okubo-Weiss algorithm. All of these tools directly access the servers hosting the data with the OPeNDAP protocol or automatically download and access the HDF or netCDF files hosted on the servers, eliminating the need to manually download, convert, and process files yourself. Also added was a tool for using the HYCOM ocean currents in coral reef connectivity simulations, tools for fitting and predicting classification and regression tree models, and a tool called Create Lines From Vector Component Rasters, which allows you to visualize current rasters or other vector fields with a shapefile that resembles a "quiver plot", as well as a version of this tool specific to Aviso geostrophic currents. This release also supports ArcGIS 10, Python 2.6 and R up through version 2.13.0, fixes some bugs we did not discover in the 0.7 testing cycle, and upgrades various libraries that MGET uses internally.
31-Jul-09 - MGET 0.7 is released! For a summary of this release, please see this announcement.
Download and Installation
If you have never installed MGET before, we highly recommend you review the installation instructions before installing it.
| MGET Version | Released | Python Version | Recommended For | Installation Package | Installation Instructions | Change List |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.8 alpha 27 | 19-Jul-11 | 2.4 | ArcGIS 9.2 users | GeoEco-0.8a27.win32-py2.4.exe | 0.8 Installation Instructions | 0.8 Change List |
| 2.5 | ArcGIS 9.1, 9.3, and 9.3.1 users | GeoEco-0.8a27.win32-py2.5.exe | ||||
| 2.6 | ArcGIS 10 users | GeoEco-0.8a27.win32-py2.6.exe | ||||
| 0.7 | 31-Jul-09 | 2.4 | ArcGIS 9.2 users | GeoEco-0.7.win32-py2.4.exe | 0.7 Installation Instructions | 0.7 Change List |
| 2.5 | ArcGIS 9.1, 9.3, and 9.3.1 users | GeoEco-0.7.win32-py2.5.exe |
To help us continue to improve MGET and provide it as free software, the installation program automatically reports the result of the installation and several other pieces of data to the MGET development team. For more information about this, please review our Privacy Policy.
You can also download old releases.
Help, Feedback, and Mailing List
To get help, suggest an improvement, or send us feedback, please email mget-help@nicholas.duke.edu. We will reply as soon as possible. You may also browse the archive or subscribe to the list to see what others are saying.
To receive notification of new releases of MGET and upcoming presentations related to MGET, please subscribe to our announcements mailing list.
If you have any privacy concerns, please review our Privacy Policy before emailing or subscribing.
Citation Instructions
If you use Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools for a project that results in a peer-reviewed paper or other scientific report, please cite it as follows:
Roberts, J.J., B.D. Best, D.C. Dunn, E.A. Treml, and P.N. Halpin (2010). Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools: An integrated framework for ecological geoprocessing with ArcGIS, Python, R, MATLAB, and C++. Environmental Modelling & Software 25: 1197-1207 doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2010.03.029.
If you do not have access to the journal and would like a private copy of the paper, please email us. Your citations help us obtain funding for additional development and allow us to continue to offer MGET as free software. Thank you for your support.
More Information
- MGET Overview for NOAA Coastal GeoTools 2009 Conference (Microsoft PowerPoint format)
- MGET examples
- MGET installation statistics
- Publications about MGET and projects that used it
- Online documentation
Software License
Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License (available in the file LICENSE.TXT) for more details.
Acknowledgments
Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools is built atop a lot of other software, much of it free. We would particularly like to thank these developers for making their excellent work freely reusable. Without your work, MGET would never have gotten off the ground. Cheers to all of you!
Development of Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools is funded by:
