[SoC] Final report: home range plugin for QGIS

[Anne Ghisla]

Hello all,

Summer of Code has finished, and I still not figure it. It has been a great
experience, my first job as programmer that made this summer a very special one.

The plugin I' ve developed makes available inside QGIS [0] some home range
estimators, just like Animal Movement extension does in ESRI ArcView [1]. But it
does not conceal algorithms and their implementation: all code is available to
users. The core of the plugin is a script that calls R [2] and executes analysis
with given parameters. The functions are contained in R additional package
adehabitat. The user doesn't interact directly with R, except for package
installation and update. Analysis is run completely via QGIS GUI.

This was my first GSoC. It started as a bet, I didn't expect to be accepted, as
I'm a student in natural sciences who likes playing with the code.
When I read that my application had been accepted, I couldn't believe it! 
Soon I began working on the project, and the beginning has been tough. When I
got used of the tools, things went considerably better. I found weekly reports
very useful, as I learnt to set small objectives that I could reach in few days.

All summer has been hard work to get the plugin walk on its own legs
(translitterated from Italian...), and it's not finished: the project is open to
improvements.
Keep an eye on the wiki page of the plugin [3] for updates, and also AniMove
site [4] for other open source solutions for animal movement analysis.

I want to thank first my mentor, Timothy H. Keitt; then, Damiano Preatoni, that
gave me precious advices and hosted the code on his SVN server; all QGIS
developers for their help, especially Barry Rowlingson and Carson Farmer; Google
staff for efficiency (we were more than 1120 this year! and they gave us a gift
book!); many, many thanks. 

Hope to participate again to SoC next year! 

best regards,

Anne

[0] http://www.qgis.org/
[1] http://www.absc.usgs.gov/glba/gistools/animal_mvmt.htm
[2] http://www.r-project.org/
[3] http://wiki.qgis.org/qgiswiki/GSoC2008Rbinding
[4] http://www.faunalia.it/animove/