Biodiversity Software from Heaven to your Mac!
by Don Rittner
I spent twenty years researching and saving the Albany Pine Barrens during the 70's and 80's. It was a lot of hard work. But I have just found a software program that would have saved me 10 years research (and less gray hair) if I had it at the time. It's called FullPixelSearch and it allows you to use your Mac to measure biodiversity right from any scanned TIFF or PICT image (such as a satellite or aerial photograph). It works amazingly well, and is easy to use; not straying from the Mac Interface.
For example, if I want to find areas that match my definition of a pristine pine barrens (Pitch Pine-Scrub Oak-Heaths), I would only have to select the pixel color match for pitch pines, scrub oaks, and heath species. The software would then find them all for me, instantly. If I wanted to find intrusive species such as black locust or aspen, again, I match the pixel colors and the software finds them all for me. Try doing that species for species the old fashioned way, by looking at a aerial photo and picking them out by hand -- one at a time.
The creator of the program, Richard Podolsky, is a well known ecologist as well as a computer programmer, and the combination is a reward for those of us trying to save endangered ecosystems. He has been a consultant and instructor at places like the United Nations, National Audubon, Rutgers, University of Michigan, and others. His earlier program, GAIA, was the first remote sensing and satellite imaging analysis program developed for the Mac.
I have just started to use the program so will not pretend to tell you all the complexities of it, but FullPixelSearch recognizes patterns, based on the criteria you assign, and lets you search for those patterns as well as compare them to other patterns. The software uses the well known Shannon Index, an ecological information model that measures the amount of heterogeneity or diversity in ecosystems. <
The software, besides calculating landscape diversity and richness, matches patterns at the pixel level making it extremely accurate. You can search by copying and pasting regions of interest into a template, or pixel by pixel - it then scans the image and records the location of all regions that match your search criteria. The newest version, 1.5, of the software has these features:
>A customizable heads-up display where data about a region follows the cursor as you range over the image;
>Annotate or name colors;
>Calibrate an image to any user-defined unites;
>Create user-defined coordinate system for an image;
>Import and export, and to quantify palettes;
>Locate regions of interest and define a search based on those regions;
>Save, as files, search templates and the location of all matches generated;
>Generate and store in memory 10 histograms of any selected region of an image;
>Plot the histograms by several different color axis;
>Re-color, threshold, and animate the image palette;
>Calculate diversity of any image or region of an image, and;
>Create a neighbor report for all pixels neighboring up to eight pixels away from any color thereby enabling the user to quantify the degree of randomness in an image.
I have only started to explore the potential of this software.There are many uses for it besides ecology. Astronomers, doctors, geologists, geographers, mathematicians, artists, anyone needing to look for defined patterns in an image can use this program.
The program is one of a kind. Once you start using it, you will wonder how you ever got any work done without it. The program is not inexpensive, but worth every penny of it. Special prices do exist. Contact them at:
Richard Podolsky Avian Systems 1275 15th St., #15G Fort Lee, NJ 07024 Voice: 201 224 2025 email: AOL: Podolsky; CIS: 76460,2615; Internet: either richardP@eworld.com or podolsky@aol.com Retail price: $1295 ($895 academic)
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