Field ecologists like me (that like looking at trees and birds) are lucky some of our fellow scientists prefer the safety and comfort of the lab and provide us with nifty free programs that convert our raw field data into nice publishable statistics. Some of my personal favorites are the ArcGIS extensions written by Jenness Enterprises (e.g. Nearest features, Grid tools), Patch Analyst (the modern version of Fragstats to calculate spatial statistics of fragments in a landscape), Ecosim (e.g. for exploring size structures in bird communities), EstimateS (for calculating diversity indices), and many more.

But it is hard to keep up to date with all the tools and techniques and software is often burried somewhere down a narrow e-alley on the vast internet. Citing the software often requires some creativity by the author. For that reason, Ecography is launching a new platform to introduce and demonstrate ecological software: Software Notes It’s certainly worth following up this new section. The first contribution deals with RangeModel , a tool for exploring and assessing geometric constraints on species richness along transects.