My name is Spencer Yates, and I am a microbiology and zoology major. I’m currently applying to graduate schools with areas in virology. The reading was very interesting to me. I had no idea that GIS software was so important to modern research and engineering. I thought it was just for geographic research, but it’s much more broad than that. The creation of the GIS software is also fascinating, as it involved so many people all across the world over a large period of time. It is kind of hard for me to understand so far, as I’ve never really done mapping before. However, I am determined to master GIS by the end of this course. I think that this skill will be really useful for me in the future.
When I looked for applications of GIS that are interesting to me, I chose two categories: professional interest and personal interest. For professional interest, I looked up if GIS is useful for tracking the progression of diseases. There are a lot of examples of this, but I found a recent malaria study using GIS mapping to explore the prevalence of the disease in Nigeria to be the most fascinating. The paper used GIS mapping to show the changes in prevalence in areas of Nigeria over a 20-year period, which is incredibly useful to know. Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00436-024-08276-0#Tab2
As for a more personal interest, I chose butterfly migration and conservation. In this category, monarch butterfly migration and habitat appeared to be a highly studied area. I found an interesting example of mapping the amount of suitable overwintering habitat for monarch butterflies in Mexico. While this map is only for one point in time, making similar maps in the coming years can allow for the tracking of habitat gain and loss, which can let researchers know if conservation efforts are effective or not. Source: https://creeksidescience.com/what-we-do/gis-analysis/
The blog is not letting me upload either of the maps I found, but they are in the links if you want to see them.