Free and Open Source Software

To maximise the reusability and reproducibility of our workflows—both for ourselves and for others—we preferentially use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) whenever suitable and appropriate options are available.

Bibliography manager *USEFUL FOR ALL TESS LAB MEMBERS*

Zotero is a FOSS to facilitate managing libraries of information sources and citations for automatic referencing in documents. Zotero can be extended with Citethisforme.com to facilitate website citations.

Data analysis *USEFUL FOR ALL TESS LAB MEMBERS

R is a FOSS powerful computing language for most aspects of scientific computing including but not limited to geospatial and statistical analysis and beautiful data visualisations.

GIS

QGIS App that uses QGIS backend to facilitate GIS and data collection in the field

GIS (Fieldwork)

QField is a FOSS application using a QGIS backend to facilitate GIS and data collection in the field.

Version Control

Git is a FOSS tool to help develop and share our computer code.

Data analysis, presentation and publication

Q uarto is a powerful successor to Markdown, for creating notebooks and presentations from code.

Diagraming

draw.io is a FOSS flowchart maker and diagram software for making high quality outputs, with online and offline versions.

Surveying

Open Drone Map is a FOSS application for processing photogrammetry data, including multispectral imagery.

Office work

LibreOffice FOSS LibreOffice is the modern version of ‘OpenOffice’, and is the ‘go to’ if needing a FOSS alternative from Microsoft Office. Includes PDF editing capability.

Graphics Editing

Gimp is a FOSS equivalent to Photoshop, fully featured and very powerful for editing raster images and photographs.

Graphics editing

Inkscape is FOSS professional quality vector graphics software, which can be useful for producing publication-quality figures to illustrate and communicate scientific concepts.

Screen Video Recording

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is a FOSS for recording screen captures with voiceover and video feeds, this can be useful for making instructional guides and tutorials.

Video Editing

Shotcut is a FOSS video editing software (fully featured). Useful for converting formats and editing clips with sound tracks etc. Award winning feature length movies have been made using this software and there are lots of tutorials available online.

Video Playback

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files, and various streaming protocols.

File management

We use Git to help develop and share our computer code, using the TESS Lab organisation on GitHub.

File management

FileZilla is a FOSS tool for facilitating file transfer. (Note this functionality can also be accessed programmatically).

File management

7zip is a FOSS for compressing and uncompressing files.

Geospatial Processing

Cloud Compare is an open-source software for working with point clouds (great as a viewer but beware of truncated precision if saving exports).

Programming

Visual Studio Code is a FOSS Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that’s great for coding with multiple languages including Python.

Spectroscopy software

Spectragryph is a FOSS package valuable for spectroscopy applications.

GNSS Processing

RTKLIB is a FOSS library for working with Global Navigation Satellite System data, for example post-processing RINEX data or converting to KML files.

Qualitative Data Analysis***

Qualitative data analysis and organisation frequently use the proprietary NVivo software. Possible FOSS alternatives are listed below and need further evaluation to determine prefered option(s) based on functionality, ease of use, maintence/development and licencing.

Taguette, a qualitative coding tool, allowing users to upload and tag research materials for analysis, similar to how one might use highlighters with printed documents,
RQDA: An R library for qualitative data analysis, hosted on GitHub.
QualCoder: A free, open-source platform that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux, with multimedia capabilities and an optional AI chatbot module,
AQUAD 8: A platform supporting various data types (text, audio, video, images).

Other non-FOSS but very useful software

Canva powerful tool to create professional designs.

Collaboration Tools

Jamboard quick and easy input in group meetings, anonymous by default.

Padlet is slightly more structured/complex than Jamboard, with the ability to comment and like comments/notes. Useful for slightly more formal capture of ideas.

Presentation Tools

Mentimeter is great for capturing interactive polls in real time.

Accessibility (and more)

Microsoft Edge is a free web browser with a very good read-aloud (text-to-speech) capability that some people find helpful (easily reading webpages and PDFs, highlighting each word as it is read, easily skip paragraphs, adjustable pace and range of voices, with no annoying extensions). It also supports PDF editing (adding text, drawings and highlighting).

Data analysis

RStudio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) optimised for integration with R.

Miro for making pretty systems diagrams, flowcharts and much more. (Consider whether to use the FOSS draw.io instead).

Photogrammetry

Pix4D for photogrammetric processing of image data from drone platforms etc.