Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools
What is it?
Marine Geospatial Ecology Tools (MGET) is a free, open-source geoprocessing toolbox that can help you solve a wide variety of marine research, conservation, and spatial planning problems. MGET plugs into ArcGIS and can perform tasks such as:
- Accessing oceanographic data from ArcGIS
- Identifying ecologically-relevant oceanographic features in remote sensing imagery
- Building predictive species distribution models
- Modeling habitat connectivity by simulating hydrodynamic dispersal of larvae
- Detecting spatiotemporal patterns in fisheries and other time series data

Learn more!
- For a quick overview, please see our latest Overview Presentation (PPTX, PDF)
- For a detailed description of MGET’s design and examples of its usage, please see our papers and those by our users
- For a list of tools within MGET and typical use cases, please see the ArcGIS Tutorial (under construction)
- For a worked example of one popular use case, please see this downloadable species distribution modeling example
Programming Tutorial
Invoking MGET tools programatically MGET is, in essence, a library of functions. The functions are implemented in various programming languages, mainly Python, R, C++, and MATLAB, but are exposed uniformly via several widely-used interface technologies. Depending on your favored programming environment, you may invoke a given function: From ArcGIS as a geoprocessing tool From Python…
ArcGIS Tutorial
In ArcGIS, MGET appears as a geoprocessing toolbox. The toolbox contains about 300 tools. The tools may be executed individually, wired together into graphical workflows using the ArcGIS ModelBuilder, executed programmatically from geoprocessing scripts, or executed from the ArcGIS Command Line window. Accessing the MGET toolbox in the ArcToolbox window After you have installed MGET…
New larval connectivity modeling tools
For additional help with these tools, please contact mget-help@nicholas.duke.edu We are pleased to announce a major update to MGET’s larval connectivity modeling tools. Prior to MGET 0.8a62, the larval connectivity modeling tools were based on the approach described in Treml et al. (2008). In MGET 0.8a62, we added new tools that implement the Treml et…
Predictive Modeling Workflow
In MGET 0.8a42, we introduced a simplified workflow for predictive modeling, shown here for generalized linear models (GLMs). The new workflow is the same for all model types (GLM, GAM, etc.) and consists of three steps: Fit the model to training data in a table. This works the same as before. The model formula specifies…