ABSTRACT
If you are familiar with using a GIS (geographic information systems) package such as ArcMap or MapInfo, you will be aware that one of the things you must learn is how to ‘re-think’ a problem into a form which can be tackled by using the GIS software. For example, you may be interested in whether traffic has an effect on the vegetation near roads. This is a spatial problem; however, to use GIS and to study it, we will have to be more specific about what sort of effect we might expect, and what we mean by ‘near’. We might decide to concentrate on species diversity using results from a series of sample plots at varying distances from a road. A very simple analysis would be to compare the results for plots within 10 m away from a road with those which are further away than this. In GIS terms, we would create a 10-m buffer around the road and produce summary statistics for sites within and for those outside it.
