User:Simon Cropper

Introduction to basic skills and background

I am the Director and Principle Consultant of Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd.

I have been involved in the use of geospatial software since 1996, and have been using a wide range of desktop packages to access, analyze and print maps of flora, fauna and vegetation. I currently use gvSIG as my primary GIS solution.

I have a long history in the development of relational databases for the storage of plant and animal locational and monitoring data. I am very familiar with the use of Visual Foxpro, although I also program in a variety of other languages.

In 1993 published the book "Management of Endangered Plants" through CSIRO, excapsulating 5-years research on the monitoring and management of over 200 rare or threatened plant species in Victorian National Parks.

In recent times (2009-2010) I have moved from a totally Windows-based operating system to Ubuntu. Apart from some small legacy programs, written in Visual Foxpro (VFP), all core programs have been replaced by FOSS. When necessary, I run VFP in Windows XP within a Virtual Machine.