AJ Week 1

Hi! My name is AJ Lashway, I’m a senior Zoology, Environmental Science, and English (Creative Writing) major. I’m living in BMH this year with a couple friends as well as my cat Jesper! I’m taking this class to try and better understand GIS since it keeps on coming up in my classes and jobs that I’m looking into for after school. I work for the athletic department, so if you go to any field hockey, soccer, or lacrosse games you’ll most likely be hearing my voice over the speakers for announcements 🙂

The Schuurman reading was very interesting, I had no idea there were/are essentially two different factors in GIS (GISystems versus GIScience). The argument as to whether the program is meant to just plot the data or be used to further analyze was very interesting. The reluctance to switch from hand-drawn cartography was surprising as well. With how far technology has come, it seems obvious to let a program take care of all of the monotonous work, but the manpower originally needed to work programs like GIS must’ve made it seem like more trouble than it was worth.

I found an article using GIS to visualize the distribution of native versus invasive species of fishes in the US. By using GIS, they were able to clearly pick out the fact that non-native fish tend to cluster closer to the east and west coast, while natives are primarily in the midwest. This would’ve been more difficult to conceptualize had they just been looking at a table full of numbers.

(Holcombe, T., Stohlgren, T. J., & Jarnevich, C. (2007). Invasive species management and research using GIS.)

GIS is also often applied in urban/city management. The City of Delaware uses CityWorks, which is a program that utilizes GIS in order to view a myriad of projects across the city. This includes access to all of the storm drain information (inlets and outlets), hydrant status, as well as the locations of any active work. Many cities are moving towards developing maps and models that display a broad range of demographics, rather than just basic aspects involved in planning (Hamilton et al., 2005).