Department of Geography
Facilities
State-of-the-art laboratory facilities are just one of the points of pride of the Geography Department. Also listed below are many "virtual" facilities — resources that faculty find very helpful to geography students.
GIS Lab
The Department of Geography's Geotechniques lab houses resources for teaching and research in geospatial technologies. The lab is equipped with 19 Dell Optiplex GX 620 workstations running state-of-the-art software for GIS, remote sensing, and statistical analysis. Examples of courses taught in the lab include:
- GEOG 081: Geotechniques
- GEOG 095: TAP (Teacher Advisor Program) service-learning satellite class
- GEOG 184: Geographic Information: Concepts & Applications
- GEOG 185: Remote Sensing,, Geog 204: Spatial Analysis
- GEOG 246: Advanced Topics in Climate and Water
- GEOG 281: Advanced Topics in GIS and Remote Sensing.
Research by faculty and students using the lab include projects on climate science, landuse/landcover change, water resources, transportation, and spatial justice.The GIS lab is open to geography major and minors during non-scheduled class times.
Software suite:
- ArcGIS v. 10.0
- IDRISI Tiaga
- ENVI v. 5
- SPSS v. 17.0.2
- JMP v. 8.0
- Google Earth
- NASA Worldwind
Geography materials in Bailey/Howe Library
The University library contains a collection of about 150,000 maps and atlases as well as being a regional depository for government documents.
Geospatial data sites
- Vermont’s Spatial Data headquarters, Start here for local spatial data.
- The US Census data gateway page
- The spatial data area of the census website
- Metadata search engine and standards
- Columbia University's spatial data sets: This data include diverse maps covering many interesting topics from the human footprint to population, location and climate estimates. The site is very straightforward, interesting, and easy to use. (see also http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/download_data.html) The site contains many data sets with sites of their own, a few of which are outlined below.
- Columbia's Center for International Earth Science Information network maps: one map shows gradations in human impact on the land areas of the world, and the other that maps the areas of least human influence left in the world. Both data sets are available for download, for free.
- The Ramsar Wetlands Data Gateway provides access to spatial and tabular data relevant to Wetlands of International Importance listed under the auspices of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. The data is searchable using many different filter and keyword functions.
- Data from many of Nasa's satellites: There is a huge amount of information available, but the search is awkward and you really need to know what it is you want to be successful.
- Satellite photos for download: You can search by satellite or by type of data.
- Nasa's global change master directory, a comprehensive database of data pertaining to earth sciences. The data are organized by major topic, and then by subsets. This site is very easy to use and find what you're looking for. One of the best.
- EROS Data Center's site, with many valuable data sets. They have aerial photography, maps, land cover and elevation data etc. Most of the data costs money, however, which reduces this site's attractiveness.
- ERSI GIS spatial data, this site has many downloads. Most of the data costs money to download. Check out the census data, because it's free and comprehensive.
- Geography network: This site is one of the simplest and best. The data provided is pretty amazing, including free zoomable DEM data for the entire United States. Check this out.
- University of Arkansas' database of mostly free geospatial and attribute data. The data sources are group by sate, and the list of places to go is huge.
Last modified February 05 2013 09:27 AM