NATURE WORLDWIDE PREFERRED TOOLS: ILWIS GIS

WORLD INSTITUTE FOR CONSERVATION & ENVIRONMENT, WICE

ILWIS 3.4, THE FREE  USER-FRIENDLY RASTER AND VECTOR  GIS

ILWIS.ORG

This website promotes the use of the free open source GIS software "Integrated Land and Water Information System, ILWIS 3.4, the world's most user-friendly integrated software for raster processing remotely sensed satellite images and making vector maps. Its fully integrated approach and user- make it particularly suitable for natural resources managers, field scientists, biologists, ecologists, etc., as well as for educators. Some of the key futures of ILWIS 3.4 are: 

Key features

1. Vector and Raster capacity integrated into 1 software package

2. Developed by an autonomous higher education institution under the Dutch government

3. Initiated in 1984 with a subsidy from the Ministry of Development cooperation, ILWIS 3.4 is one of the oldest GIS programmes around

4. With both vector and raster integrated into one package, it takes less time to learn to use the programme

5. Being developed by a training institute, ILWIS 3.4 has always been tested for its user-friendliness for more than 2 decades on thousands of students 

6. The biggest savings in using ILWIS 3.4 is in its greater use efficiency, thus saving costly production time

7. Free open source software available for downloading by anyone

8. More than 2 decades of development now continued by 52North, a consortium of open source developers

9. No costly periodic updates required like for the commercial packages;

10. Some of the greatest selections of  import  and export modules of widely used data formats

11. On-screen and tablet digitizing

12. Comprehensive set of image processing tools

13. Orthophoto, image georeferencing, transformation and mosaicing

14. Advanced modeling and spatial data analysis

15. 3D visualization with interactive editing for optimal view findings

16. Rich projection and coordinate system library

17. Geo-statistical analyses, with Kriging for improved interpolation

18. Production and visualization of stereo image pairs

19. Spatial Multiple Criteria Evaluation

The use of ILWIS is growing rapidly, as can be seen from our download statistics since we launched facilitated the possibility to download ILWIS in July 2007:

More than 3000 people have downloaded ILWIS from this site and now have the opportunity to develop their GIS skills. If these people would have had to purchase packages with similar abilities to handle both raster and vector from the market leaders, they would have had to spend an estimated 3,016 X 10,000 ( the costs of 1 vector + 1 mid-range raster lisence) = $10,000,000! All these people now have vector and raster software for free.

ILWIS.ORG has been created and is maintained by the World Institute for Conservation and Environment, WICE to help ILWIS users to support each other and to promote access to completely free, integrated user-friendly raster and vector GIS package for natural resources managers, protected areas administrations and conservationists. It is also part of an integrated network of web sites dealing with different topics on nature, nature conservation and natural resources management built around Nature Worldwide at http://www.nature-worldwide.info the official website of WICE.