Spatial and spatio-temporal Environmental Modeling: Equipping your open source Toolbox

Modeling is a fundamental tool of nowadays scientific craftsmanship. Environmental sciences are equally grounded on measurement and modeling. The continuous rise in computer power and storage capacity unleashed unprecedented analytical power to everyone. The modeling software has evolved, too: in particular, the open-source licensing paradigm offers the opportunity to include scientifically reliable tools into every researcher's workflow. Environmental modeling exploits a series of tools from remote sensing to GIS, from statistics to programming to database management to produce outputs from sampling and working hypotheses. The aim of this lecture is to help students build their own toolbox of modeling software and techniques, exploiting some state of the art packages and programming languages. A few free and accessible (though not open) tools are discussed, too.