The new version of TerrSet/IDRISI, called liberaGIS, will include:
- An improved Land Change Modeler tool with support for Jurisdictional and Nested REDD (JNR), a framework that helps governments protect and manage forests and mitigate the impacts of climate change. REDD stands for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.” Clark Labs developed these tools for Verra, the leading standards organization for the conduct of REDD projects.
- In the Earth Trends Modeler, a new tool for climate teleconnection analysis, which is used to identify recurrent climate patterns over wide spans of the earth that are generally obscured by short-term variability (El Niño and La Niña, the periodic warming and cooling of the central and eastern Pacific, are well known examples that lead to dramatic weather changes worldwide, but many others exist).
- A major suite of tools for raster editing. Satellite images and many environmental data sets are best stored as raster images – fine numeric matrices that can be displayed as colored pixels on digital displays. Maps created from satellite images often need manual editing. Based on the experience gained from 10 years of mapping shrimp aquaculture and its impacts on mangroves in the tropics for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Clark Labs has developed a suite of special tools for facilitating the process.
The new version also will be streamlined by removing components that relied on external programs that are no longer supported by their original developers. These include:
- The deprecated MAGICC/SCENGEN 5.3 tools from the National Center for Atmospheric Research originally developed for the fourth IPCCC climate assessment.
- The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s standalone ECOCROP database of information on plant characteristics and crop environmental requirements, now replaced with an on-line tool. Because of this and the previous point, the Climate Change Adaptation Modeler will be removed after moving some components to the Habitat and Biodiversity Modeler.
The Ecosystem Services Modeler, based on the InVEST toolset from the National Capital Group will also be removed. Newer open-source and freely available tools are now directly available from that group and work well with TerrSet/IDRISI.