Software Comparison Tables

Three tables (Tables 7 through 9) are available as a downloadable Excel workbook. These tables provide information about the individual software packages in a spreadsheet format for ease of comparison. These tables can help to identify appropriate software based on a series of screening criteria, such as optimization questions, products (outputs), operating system, costs, and geospatial methods.

• Table 7 lists optimization questions and whether the software is helpful for answering these questions. For each question, if the software does not include any of the methods to address the question, then a “no” symbol is shown. Some software includes the methods, but is not specifically designed to directly answer questions for example, for sample spacing, hot spot detection, or monitoring program optimization. If the software includes the methods, but additional effort is required to answer the question, then a “qualified yes” symbol is shown. If the software is specifically designed to answer the optimization question, then a “yes” symbol is shown.
• Table 8 lists key information such as the costs, required operating systems, the products supplied by the software, the formats used for data input (importing options), and data output (exporting options). This table includes software outputs based on geospatial methods, such as internal maps and graphs, contouring ability, and animation.
• Table 9 lists the geospatial methods and describes which ones are available in each software package. The methods are clustered by subject: EDA basics, simple methods, more complex methods, advanced methods, and uncertainty analysis.