Although the commercial software ArcView GIS by ESRI is quite old respect its new version the ArcGIS, it has demonstrated to be a quite useful tool for the processing of information that has geographic attributes, i.e., information with qualitative or quantitative value that has a geographical position (Latitude, Longitude, Elevation), and it is still being used in several educational institutions. Why? because buying it and/or upgrading it into the new ArcGIS version is not cheap!!!
GIS are fundamental tools for the generation of input maps (e.g., catchment delineation, land use maps, vegetation type maps, etc) for environmental models. We may also process geographical data using C++, Fortran and others (maps are just arrays). However, the advantage of using GIS software packages is that they have several functions already programmed. By the way, Matlab is also an alternative.
In this post I am showing some links on resources related to the use of ArcView in environmental modelling.
