– Hello! My name is Pacey Schtucka and I am a freshman at OWU. I am majoring in environmental science with a minor in geography. I am from Wadsworth, OH. Since a young age I have always loved being outdoors. My love for being outside turned into a passion for the environment as I grew older. Now, I want to learn more about the ins and outs of it all
- As I am starting this course, I have a very limited knowledge of what GIS actually is. The reading helped me to get a better grasp of what purpose GIS serves and who it serves. With that being said, I think that it is really awesome how it has so many different means to different groups. This reading showed me that from the beginning of its time, GIS has been extremely diverse and never has had one solid definition. I also found it interesting that now GIS is a computer program, but its origins come before computers were universally usable. One thing I am confused about is how this reading talked about GIS being different from mapping stating that, “it’s differentiated from “mapping” because it generates more information or knowledge than can be gleaned from maps or data alone,” but then goes on to say that some see it as an “extension of mapping” (Schuurman). The reading goes a lot of back and forth stating different viewpoints on GIS so perhaps my confusion may just be coming from interpreting the viewpoints wrong. Furthermore, I was unaware of how incorporated GIS is into everyday life. GIS is something that I first heard about my first semester at OWU. My peers told me how learning GIS would be a useful skill and I took their word for it. This reading by Schuurman is opening my eyes to a whole new perspective in the sense of GIS. Schuurman describes in the reading how almost everything can be brought back to GIS. She gives the example of food; every step from growing the food to how it gets to your plate can be brought back to GIS. It was really interesting to read about Schuurman breaking down every which way GIS is involved in a process that I did not even consider it to be involved in before reading.
- One application I find interesting is GIS to study glaciers. Using ChatGPT, I found that GIS is able to map out glaciers and then the mapping is used to show the change and help look into the melting rate. From this I googled GIS glacial change and I found the World Glacier Monitoring Serivce on. WGMS teams with ESRI ArcGIS and allows people to view the glaciers over time. https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/students-3/resources-for-teachers/exploring-present-day-glaciers-in-a-gis/
- Also using Chat GPT I found the GIS is used for disease mapping. GIS is able to be used to map different regions for disease spreading and to see what areas are affected. This made me interested in the use of GIS for COVID-19 mapping. I found this map from ArcGIS at https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 . This map was last updated on 3/10/23 but until then they used GIS to map the number of COVID-19 cases around the world.
