A workshop on a new spatial modeling system, LSL is being presented at the Wildlife Society meeting in Tucson, Arizona, on September 22nd.
LSL, or Landscape Scripting Language (Kushneriuk and Rempel, 2004), is a spatial modeling system consisting of a scripting language and integrated development environment. LSL is used for developing and testing models that calculate habitat and landscape composition and configuration metrics, particularly over multiple spatial scales, and to report on these results. It is also used for quantitatively describing complex spatial patterns as “spatial signatures”. People that might be interested in LSL range from researchers who are conducting spatially explicit, multiple scale habitat modeling (including development of RSFs), to planners involved in scenario analysis of biodiversity conservation options, to forest managers wanting to develop spatial prescriptions for implementing forest management objectives. Analyses under LSL are primarily based on a hierarchical hexagonal grid system. This permits creation of explicitly defined regions that can be nested across spatial scales. Input data includes points, lines, polygons, and raster, and output formats include ESRI shapefiles and Foxpro DBF files. The system is extremely fast and takes full advantage of system memory. One can consider LSL as a powerful, but narrowly defined GIS system that is optimized for multiple scale modeling. The purpose of this workshop is to demonstrate the key features of LSL, and to have users become familiar with creating programs, reports, and output from LSL. Links to the conference web site and a brochure illustrating key features of LSL is below. Paste links into browser and remove spaces: Workshop: www. abstractsonline. com/viewer/viewSession. asp Wildlife Society conference: www. wildlife. org/conference/tucson07/index. cfm Brochure on LSL: www. ferit.ca/downloads/LSL. pdf Also, I will be sending a notice soon on release of Patch Analyst for ArcGIS. Cheers, Rob Rempel
