My name is Hannah Wagner and I am a sophomore majoring in environmental science.
I first took the syllabus quiz and then read the text which was an introduction to GIS and its history as well as its uses. I found this whole reading to be very interesting and educating because I wasn’t really sure what GIS was and what it was used for. I understood the basics more when it was explained that in the past Ian McHarg had layered tracing paper with different parts of the landscape in order to see where a highway would cause the least amount of disturbance to the environment. I assumed GIS was just simple maps but I was unaware of the “layering” that gives much more data about the location. I was shocked to learn how many industries use GIS to make spatial decisions, especially when those decisions affect everyday life. I was really interested in learning how business farmers were using GIS to decide the best places to plant crops due to their distance to markets and even to understand why a section of crops may have a disease. I was also very interested in “the two faces of GIS”, GISystems and GIScience. I understood it as GISystems is straight forward, the process of gathering data, inputting it, analyzing it, and creating a map all with the given technology. GIScience is the side that questions the technology and digs deeper to find the best ways to represent data. I appreciate the GIScience side that doesn’t blindly trust the code to create the best and most accurate representation. I also found it very interesting that people can perceive information from visual displays easier than a data set or table. This makes total sense to me because I can understand data much better when it is visual and it can help me connect relationships between data much easier.
I have always been interested in agriculture and its relationship to the environment so I was excited to find a map related to agriculture. I found a website showing lots of different ways GIS is used in precision agriculture mapping. I picked a map that assesses vegetation.
https://www.satimagingcorp.com/services/geographic-information-systems/gis-maps-agriculture-mapping/
I also looked up GIS application in air quality and found a pretty neat visual that combined different data.
https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-living-atlas/health/air-quality-aware