ABSTRACT
A defining feature of R is the way interact with it: type commands and hit Enter (or ctrl+Enter if writing code in the source editor in RStudio) to execute them interactively. This way of interacting with the computer is called a command-line interface (CLI). In dedicated geographic information systems (GIS) packages, by contrast, the emphasis tends to be on the graphical user interface (GUI). Another advantage of dedicated GISs is that they provide access to hundreds of ‘geoalgorithms’. QGIS is one of the most popular open-source GIS. Its main advantage lies in the fact that it provides a unified interface to several other open-source GIS. Though System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) is a hybrid GIS, its main focus has been on raster processing, and particularly on digital elevation models. Hence, SAGA is especially good at the fast processing of large (high-resolution) raster datasets.
