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Landscape metrics are used in a wide range of environmental studies such as land use change and land degradation studies, soil erosion and runoff predictions, management of hunting communities, and strategic planning for environmental management, to name but a few. Due to their utility for a variety of applications, there are many indices and software packages that have been designed to provide calculations and analysis of landscape structure patterns in categorical maps. With the purpose of making a profound comparison between the most used tools (Fragstats, V-Late, PA4…), we examined their advantages and disadvantages in order to create a list of common features that need to be incorporated into this type of software. We believe that an API without limitations on data input is necessary, capable of calculating vector or raster metrics and very extensible. This API should make it possible not only to build third party applications in easily, but would also make it possible to add new metrics and research into new paradigms related to traditional landscape metrics. We have started to develop a proposal based on open standards, which is FOSS. We have called this API Land-metrics DIY (Do It Yourself). It can calculate almost 40 landscape metrics from geometry provided by an ESRI Shapefile, but we are working to complete its contents as we explain in this article.

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Camera traps have become a widely used technique for conducting biological inventories, generating a large number of database records of great interest. The main aim of this paper is to describe a new Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), developed to facilitate the management of camera trapped data originated in a protected Mediterranean area (SE Spain). In the last decade, some other useful alternatives have been proposed, but ours focuses especially on a collaborative undertaking and on the importance of spatial information underpinning common camera trap studies. This FOSS application, namely "Camera Trap Manager" (CTM), has been designed to expedite the processing of the pictures on the .NET platform. CTM has a very intuitive user interface, automatic extraction of some image metadata (date, time, moon phase, location, temperature, atmospheric pressure, among others), analytical (Geographical Information Systems, statistics, charts, among others) and reporting capabilities (ESRI Shapefiles, Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets, PDF reports, among others). Using this application we have achieved a very simple management, fast analysis, and a significant reduction of costs. While we were able to classify an average of 55 pictures per hour manually, CTM has made it possible to process over 1,000 photographs per hour, consequently retrieving a greater amount of data.

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