Credits

attribution to the work this tool is built on

This tool exists because of decades of work by the open-source GIS and scientific-computing communities, and — more proximally — because of doctoral research at the University of Liverpool. Where direct intellectual or implementation debt is owed it appears below.

Acknowledgments

This web application is descended from software I originally wrote for my PhD thesis at the University of Liverpool , Department of Archaeology, Classics & Egyptology.

My doctoral supervisors shaped both the underlying research and the engineering that came out of it; neither the original tool nor this re-imagined web version would exist without their guidance.

The thesis-era software was, and is, a C++/Qt program that runs in a GRASS shell. In addition to the original, there is now also a QGIS plugin — a parallel project to this site that continues to be actively developed. The C++ thesis version remains the canonical reference for the catchment-engine math; this web application is a clean-room reimplementation that ports the engine to a server-side pure-Python pipeline, paired with a browser UI so visitors can use the model without installing QGIS or GRASS.

Algorithms & references — GRASS r.walk, Tobler 1993, walking-speed data
GRASS r.walk
Originally written by Steno Fontanari (ITC-IRST, 1992) and Pierre de Mouveaux. Maintained over decades by the GRASS GIS development team — notably Markus Neteler, Hamish Bowman, Roberto Flor, Glynn Clements, Andrea Aime, and many others. Source at github.com/OSGeo/grass. The pure-Python r.walk replacement in this codebase replicates the same Tobler-based walking-cost model — the algorithmic equivalent of the GRASS implementation, but written so it works without a system GRASS install.
Tobler's hiking function
Tobler, W. (1993). Three Presentations on Geographical Analysis and Modeling: Non-Isotropic Geographic Modeling; Speculations on the Geometry of Geography; and Global Spatial Analysis. NCGIA Technical Report 93-1.
Walking-speed reference data
Bohannon, R. W. (1997). "Comfortable and maximum walking speed of adults aged 20–79 years: reference values and determinants." Age and Ageing, 26(1), 15–19. Used as the empirical anchor for the Tobler-slider reference lines on the methodology page.
Software stack — QGIS, Python, web, hosting
QGIS + the OSGeo ecosystem
The QGIS project, its Processing framework, and the broader OSGeo foundation are the substrate this entire body of work sits on. The companion QGIS plugin (linked from Acknowledgments above) is built directly against this ecosystem.
Python scientific stack
NumPy · SciPy · GDAL (via rasterio) · pyproj · Pillow. The pure-Python r.walk + r.mapcalc.simple implementations would not exist without these libraries.
Web stack
FastAPI · Astro · Svelte · MapLibre GL JS · Apache ECharts · KaTeX · SQLAlchemy + Alembic. The typography is Tufte CSS by Dave Liepmann, adapted from Edward Tufte's conventions, with ET Book served self-hosted.
Hosting
Krystal Hosting (shared cPanel) for the live deployment at la.arkygeek.com. The deploy itself is rsync from local + Phusion Passenger restart.
Cite this work — thesis + DOI status

If you use this tool or its methodology in published research, please cite the underlying thesis:

Jorgenson, J. (2022). The Impact of South Levantine Early Bronze Age Communities On Their Landscapes. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

A DOI for the web application is pending registration via Zenodo. Once issued, this section will include the canonical software DOI alongside the thesis citation. In the meantime, if you cite the web app itself, please link to https://la.arkygeek.com and the GitHub repository at github.com/arkygeek/landuseanalyst-web.

Detailed contributor attribution — historical record from the plugin tree

The QGIS plugin's source tree contains a CREDITS.md with the more granular attribution block that travels with the original codebase, including the historical record of who contributed which piece of the engine over time.