System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) v. 2.1.4

TLDR

SAGA is an open‑source GIS platform, originally a digital terrain analysis tool released in 2004, that has evolved into a comprehensive, globally established system for scientific analysis and modeling. The paper aims to describe SAGA’s architecture, functionality, development status, and to review its broad scientific applications across terrain analysis, geomorphology, soil science, climatology, meteorology, and remote sensing. SAGA is implemented in C++ with an object‑oriented, modular architecture that supports Windows and Linux, offering an API, GUI, command‑line interpreter, and scripting interfaces to R and Python. Version 2.1.4 includes over 700 dynamically loadable tools covering a wide range of geoscientific fields. Abstract.

Abstract

Abstract. The System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) is an open-source Geographic Information System (GIS), mainly licensed under the GNU General Public License. Since its first release in 2004, SAGA has rapidly developed from a specialized tool for digital terrain analysis to a comprehensive and globally established GIS platform for scientific analysis and modeling. SAGA is coded in C++ in an object oriented design and runs under several operating systems including Windows and Linux. Key functional features of the modular organized software architecture comprise an application programming interface for the development and implementation of new geoscientific methods, an easily approachable graphical user interface with many visualization options, a command line interpreter, and interfaces to scripting and low level programming languages like R and Python. The current version 2.1.4 offers more than 700 tools, which are implemented in dynamically loadable libraries or shared objects and represent the broad scopes of SAGA in numerous fields of geoscientific endeavor and beyond. In this paper, we inform about the system's architecture, functionality, and its current state of development and implementation. Further, we highlight the wide spectrum of scientific applications of SAGA in a review of published studies with special emphasis on the core application areas digital terrain analysis, geomorphology, soil science, climatology and meteorology, as well as remote sensing.