Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1.14
Two Representations of St. Francis, South Dakota.
(left) panchromatic raster satellite
image collected in 2002 at 10 m resolution during a grassland wildfi re; (right) vector data—
rivers, roads, cities, and land use/land cover digitalized from the image.
Courtesy of:
Joseph J.
Kerski using ArcGIS software from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.
Geographers also use GIS to analyze data, which can give us
new insights into geographic patterns and relationships.
Geographers use GIS in both human and physical
geographic research. For example, political geographers
use GIS to map layers showing voters, their party registra-
tion, their race, their likelihood of voting, and their income
in order to determine how to draw voting districts in con-
gressional and state legislative elections. In this case, a
geographer can draw a line around a group of people and
ask the computer program to tally how many voters are
inside the region, determine what the racial composition is
of the district, and show how many of the current political
representatives live within the new district's boundaries.
Geographers trained in GIS employ the technol-
ogy in countless undertakings. Students who earn
undergraduate degrees in geography are employed by
software companies, government agencies, and busi-
nesses to use GIS to survey wildlife, map soils, analyze
natural disasters, track diseases, assist fi rst responders,
plan cities, plot transportation improvements, and fol-
low weather systems. For example, a group of geogra-
phers working for one GIS company tailors the GIS
software to serve the branches of the military and the
defense intelligence community. The vast amounts of
intelligence data gathered by the various intelligence
agencies can be integrated into a GIS and then analyzed
spatially. Geographers working in the defense intelli-
gence community can use GIS to query a vast amount of
intelligence, interpret spatial data, and make recom-
mendations on issues of security and defense.
The amount of data digestible in a GIS, the power of
the location analysis that can be undertaken on a computer
platform, and the ease of analysis that is possible using GIS
software applications allow geographers to answer compli-
cated questions. For example, geographer Korine Kolivras
analyzed the probability of dengue fever outbreaks in
Hawaii using GIS (Fig. 1.15). The maps Kolivras pro-
duced may look as simple and straightforward as the chol-
era maps produced by Dr. John Snow in the 1800s, but the
amount of data that went into Kolivras's analysis is stagger-
ing in comparison. Dengue fever is carried by a particular
kind of mosquito called the Aedes mosquito. Kolivras ana-
lyzed the breeding conditions needed for the Aedes mos-
quito, including precipitation, topography, and several
other variables, to predict what places in Hawaii are most
likely to experience an outbreak of dengue fever.
A new term of art used in geography is GISci.
Geographic information science (GISci) is an emerging
research fi eld concerned with studying the development
and use of geospatial concepts and techniques to examine
geographic patterns and processes. Your school may have
a program in GISci that draws across disciplines, bringing
together the computer scientists who write the programs,
the engineers who create sensors that gather data about
the Earth, and the geographers who combine layers of
data and interpret them to make sense of our world.
Use Google Earth to fi nd a place where a humanitarian cri-
sis is occurring today (such as Haiti or Pakistan) and study
the physical and human geography overlaid on Google Earth
in this place. How does studying this place on Google Earth
change your mental map of the place and/or your under-
standing of the crisis?
