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Forestry Management Geodatabase Technical Manual

5 Toolset

5.1 Platforms

The FMG toolbox uses ESRI and open source software to construct a custom toolbox for analysis and reporting of forestry inventory data.

  • ArcGIS Desktop -Desktop (ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro) are industry standard enterprise desktop GIS products for conducting geospatial analysis. The ArcGIS desktop applications contain an enormous number of commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) geospatial tools for performing sophisticated analyses and visualization.
  • ArcGIS toolbox - ArcGIS Desktop allows for the creation of sophisticated custom geospatial toolboxes to be built that combine ESRI’s COTS geoprocessing tools with user created tools from several platforms (e.g., Python, R).
  • Python - ArcGIS provides a robust scripting interface to its GIS tools using the Python language. Custom geospatial toolboxes can combine ESRI’s COTS geoprocessing tools with tools available within the diverse, mature, and ever-growing Python data science ecosystem.
  • R - ESRI’s ArcGIS R-bridge product allows R tools to be called within the ArcGIS toolbox interface. This allows ArcGIS tools to take advantage of the mature ecosystem of R data science, statistical, visualization, and report generation packages