Authors: Huidae Cho – New Mexico State University
Presentation Type: Poster
Title: Open-Source Hydrology Using GRASS GIS
Abstract: GRASS GIS is an open-source GIS, which was originally developed by the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA-CERL) in 1982 for land management and environmental planning. Its version 5.0 was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) as an open-source project in October 1999. Its Project Steering Committee (PSC) members from four U.S. universities have been awarded an NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) grant to grow and sustain its OSE. Many open-source or commercial GIS users have not heard of GRASS GIS or have a common misconception that it is not user-friendly with a steep learning curve. However, it has unique core and addon modules for hydrologic analysis, and many QGIS users use it unknowingly through the QGIS plugin architecture. In this poster, I will present how to install GRASS GIS, explain its data structure and topologic nature, and how one can use it for hydrologic analysis including flow direction, flow accumulation, watershed delineation, etc. I will also discuss its future direction of development as a multidiscplinary geospatial analytics library and for cross-platform support, usability, and scientific innovations.