Exporting results to a Geographical Information System

Under the output/map folder a couple of scripts are provided to automatise the importing of RegMAS results into the GRASS GIS.

Although quite irksome to learn, Grass GIS is a very powerful open source multi platform desktop GIS that is particularly suited for raster spatial analysis and, even more important, is fully scriptable. Users can read more of it on its web-site¹⁵ or it can be downloaded it in bundle qith QGis ¹⁶, a gis application that wrap Grass making it much more easy to be used.

To import spatial data inside a GIS program manually, users have to import the raw data, define the categories and pick-up the colour for each category. These are located respectively under the asciiGrid, cats and colr subfolders. Furthermore an empty ``Region'' in the Grass format is provided in the grass/ColliEsini subfolder, containing a ``skeleton'' structure (e.g. the geographic coordinated) for the sample region.

Under Linux or Windows/Cygwin environment, the importInGrass.sh script will does the import automatically (calling the second script runWithinGrass.sh to invoke Grass commands) otherwise individual maps can be imported from the Grass command r.in.ascii and then the associated category and colour description files should be copied in the working region.

GIS post-processing is useful when we want to place into relation several spatial data, e.g. in order to calculate the land abandonment, or the production intensity or even the farm density by elevation zone or by soil type.

We could also build a matrix to show which productions are switched to an other production type after a policy change.

Plans are to create a repository of scripts to produce such statistics from the RegMAS output and user submission of their own scripts is welcome.