Geographic Information Sciences

Geographic Information Sciences (GISc) are an integrated set of spatial digital technologies including techniques, tools, and data sets associated with geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing (RS), global positioning systems (GPS), and high performance computing facilities.

These spatial digital technologies have gained prominence in geography and are emerging into associated social, behavioral, and biophysical sciences, as well as into city and regional planning, population-environment interactions, industry, government, and health sciences and health care delivery systems.

These spatial digital technologies offer the opportunity to gain fresh insights into the spatial patterns of variables and the behaviors of systems that govern natural ecosystem processes, land use land cover change, and human-environment interactions through spatial analysis, quantitative modeling, data integration and visualization.

Current research projects in the department include studies using RS/GIS/GPS to map land cover-land use change in Thailand, Ecuador, the mountain West, and Brazilian Cehado, resource management, forest succession in the Pacific Northwest of USA, and carbon, water and nutrient dynamics in watersheds and coastal regions.

Associated Faculty

Larry Band, Michael Emch, Jun Liang, Aaron Moody, Conghe Song, Steve Walsh