Hello everyone my name is Riley Brokaw, I’m a sophomore majoring in Environmental Science. In my free time, I love to go skiing at a ski resort not far from my house where I also am a children’s ski instructor. I grew up on a small family farm not far outside of Mansfield, OH that my great grandpa bought and started raising sheep, and since then we have about a dozen beef cattle we will raise and slaughter every year. I feel this is where my passion for the environment really came room and how important it is to preserve what we have around us and understand where our food comes from. In the summers we plant a pretty large garden with probably everything you could think of and just this past summer we used sunflowers as a cover crop for one of our fields which attracted so many bees. While I’m at school I enjoy getting ice cream with my 2 best friends and watching their field hockey games. I am also on the women’s tennis team here at OWU!
I thought the first chapter of Schuurman was very interesting although somewhat confusing. He really went into depth on GIS and how many purposes it has for humans and how we use it to map out where a disease originated from or how a certain species is decreasing. I liked reading how we use maps to show the path our food originated from around the world and how it got to our grocery stores. I had learned that as a business strategy, farmers use GIS to strategically send their produce to areas with the local interest of course but also purchase pricing and its associated transportation cost and if the community would spend that on the produce. It was also very interesting to read how Amazon tracks and uses information collected digitally to make a rough map of every person on their interests and likes, so Amazon can promote products tailored to what information they have. From what I understood the main similarity between GIScience and GISsystems is that they both share common kinds of literature and ideals and use spatial data. When looking at just GIS systems I learned it is heavily focused on facts, classification, and outputting data into the software. While GIS science is focused on theoretical ideas and justifying the reasons for GIS systems, a GIS scientist would look at the cause and effect and ask questions associated with why and how something would react in a situation. The history of GIS comes from a very practical area of pre-planning infrastructure and looking at the landscape for what the easiest and most cost-efficient path would be. Still to this day, we as humans try to look for those characteristics in everything we do to cause the least disruption to our environment.
I took a search into GIS on vineyards and how water erosion from farming and harvesting practices is affecting the landscape. The dotted circles show where the whole terrace has slid down from an influx of heavy rain. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2020.104604
The second source I looked into was a watershed and after sediment loss was reported a system was constructed to combat the soil erosion called the GIS-based Sediment Assessment Tool for Effective Erosion Control (SATEEC). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2005.06.013
All good. As said in some of my other comments, the history and theory of mapping and GIS is a really big topic that we are only touching on here. Hopefully just enough context to set the stage for the rest of the course.