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. 9.3
- IDRISI Tiaga
- ENVI v. 5
- SPSS v. 17.0.2
- JMP v. 8.0
- Google Earth
- NASA Worldwind
GIS Lab hours: View the lab's hour
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 November 10 2009 01:46 PM
