Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Zoology Volume 2012, Article ID 475071, 5 pages doi:10.1155/2012/475071 Research Article Appennino: A GIS Tool for Analyzing Wildlife Habitat Use Marco Ferretti, 1 Marco Foi, 2 Gisella Paci, 1 Walter Tosi, 3 and Marco Bagliacca 1 1 Department of Animal Production, University of Pisa, Viale delle Piagge 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy 2 Department of the Earth Science, University of Milan, Via Mangiagalli 34, 20133 Milan, Italy 3 Geographic Information System Office, Province of Pistoia, Corso Gramsci 110, 51100 Pistoia, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Marco Ferretti, ferretti@vet.unipi.it Received 1 October 2012; Revised 5 December 2012; Accepted 6 December 2012 Academic Editor: Hynek Burda Copyright © 2012 Marco Ferretti et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The aim of the study was to test Appennino, a tool used to evaluate the habitats of animals through compositional analysis. This free tool calculates an animal’s habitat use within the GIS platform for ArcGIS and saves and exports the results of the comparative land uses to other statistical software. Visual Basic for Application programming language was employed to prepare the ESRI ArcGIS 9.x utility. The tool was tested on a dataset of 546 pheasant positions obtained from a study carried out in Tuscany (Italy). The tool automatically gave the same results as the results obtained by calculating the surfaces in ESRI ArcGIS, exporting the data from the ArcGIS, then using a commercial spreadsheet and/or statistical software to calculate the animal’s habitat use with a considerable reduction in time. 1. Introduction Wildlife management studies identify the resources (e.g., food items or habitats) used by animals and document their availability. Resource availability is defined as the quantity accessible to the animal or populations of animals and is distinguished from abundance, which is defined as the resources in the environment [1]. Resource usage is the “quantity” taken by an animal or population of animals. Resources may be consumed, in the case of food items, or simply visited, in the case of habitats [2]. A wide variety of methods are available to study animal resource selection [3]. One such method is compositional analysis, which is often used to analyze habitat preference [4, 5]. It studies the animal’s preference both in terms of “home range” and “fix” (single positions within the home range). At present, positions and surfaces calculated in GIS programs must be exported to other free or commercial software such as spreadsheets (LibreOfficeCalc, OpenOffice, Microsoft-Excel, and so on), general statistical programs (R Project for Statistical Computing, JMP, SPSS, and so on), or specific programs (Compos Analysis v.6.3-Smith ecology, Biotas- Ecological Software Solutions LCC). The development of VHF- and GPS-radio collars to track animal movements [6–8] led to the need to store and transpose hundreds to thousands of positions (fixes) for each animal onto digital maps. Managing this dataset manually is complex and susceptible to errors by the use of simple spreadsheets; therefore, we produced a freely available tool, Appennino, that is completely operable within the GIS suite (ArcGIS) to calculate the animal’s preferences by using compositional analysis. We decided to make the tool for “ArcGIS” since most game managers use this particular program for GIS management. However, it should be stressed that we do not have any direct financial relationship with ESRI, the producers of ArcGIS. 2. Materials and Methods The tool was first coded in Visual Basic for Application (VBA) directly using the facilities provided by the ESRI ArcGIS environment [9, 10]. The tool was based on compo- sitional analysis [3, 11, 12]. Appennino can be downloaded, free of charge, from http://biblio.unipi.it/content/servizio-bibliotecario/risorse- web or http://www.marcoferretti.altervista.org/index file/ Page419.htm or http://bagliacca.altervista.org/GIStool.html. The tool needs at least four “shapes”: the land use polygon layer, the home range polygon shape of every individual animal, the land use circular random plots, and the fix layer