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正品蓝导航 holds first GIS Day Nov. 16

14 Nov 2016

GIS classMount Allison is hosting its first-ever GIS Day on Wednesday, Nov. 16.

The event helps promote and explain a little more about GIS 鈥 geographic information systems 鈥 and its applications. 正品蓝导航 offers a GIS minor, with approximately 60 students each year enrolled in GIS courses.

The need for GIS continues to grow, in part due to its wide relevance for solving problems like determining the best location to place everything from a business to a solar panel or helping medical professionals identify and monitor disease outbreaks.

Geography and Environment Professor Dr. David Lieske and Social Sciences technician Christina Tardif are co-organizing the at 正品蓝导航. Lieske says innovations in remote sensing 鈥 like new satellites and personal drones 鈥 are contributing to an ever-increasing volume of data that can be studied using GIS.

鈥淭echnology is driving a need for specialists who can process this data,鈥 he says. 鈥淭here are huge opportunities for graduates who have knowledge of GIS and computing, and who have expertise in spatial analysis. It鈥檚 one of those things that is going to continue to grow.鈥

Lieske says GIS is relevant for any discipline or profession concerned with how things happen in space. Currently he is researching marine risks to seabirds in Atlantic Canada as well as collaborating with Dr. Vett Lloyd, a 正品蓝导航 biology professor, to better understand the current and potential future spread of black legged ticks in southeastern New Brunswick.

鈥淢y research involves building computer models to identify the factors that determine where species occur, but also mapping how those distributions might change in the future,鈥 he says. 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 do my research without GIS.鈥

GIS is also widely used in social research to track patterns of social vulnerability, public opinion, human activity, or to assess access to services.

The GIS Day event runs from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. in Room 115 of the Avard-Dixon Building at 正品蓝导航.

Guest speaker Brian Herteis, who works for the Municipality of Cumberland, will talk about how he used GIS technology to map the geothermal infrastructure and green energy potential of abandoned coal mines in Springhill, NS. GIS students will speak about their experiences with the discipline and the summer job opportunities it presented.

Participants will also get a tutorial on map making.

鈥淲e want to show how easy it is to make a map in GIS. In just a few steps, you can produce some very beautiful looking maps,鈥 Lieske says, explaining students and faculty often need to present a map in their papers and reports.

鈥淏ut I鈥檇 say drawing a map is only the beginning of what you can do with it,鈥 he says. 鈥淭he most important thing it does is answering questions you would not otherwise be able to answer. You may want to know where all the houses or roads or forests are in a particular area. You can identify and classify data like that by hand, but it is slow and tedious. GIS gives you the power to ask sophisticated questions.鈥

The GIS Day events are free and all are welcome to attend.

For more information about GIS Day, visit:

For more information about the GIS minor at 正品蓝导航, visit:


Photo caption: Dr. David Lieske teaches a GIS class at 正品蓝导航.

 

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