No matter how large or small your community, planners, environmental scientists, public health officers, and other local analysts must deal with spatial information: addresses, land parcels and land cover, zoning, transportation networks, housing stock, neighborhoods, streams, and natural hazards. Federal, regional, state, county, and local planning agencies and private enterprises have realized the power of Geographic Information System (GIS) to identify problems, respond to them efficiently, and share the results with a variety of audience. GIS techniques provide tools to help you present and analyze spatial information.
This class covers a range of basic concepts of GIS and spatial analysis, covering three major processes in GIS application – data collection, data visualization, and data analysis. The course intends to provide broad coverage of GIS topics so that students will feel comfortable with the most basic functions of GIS and spatial analysis and will also be competent in using GIS software.
Note that this course is merely an introduction to GIS applications, those interested in a GIS-based career path should continue to take advanced GIS course and other programming course in Computer Science such as python, C++, SQL, etc.
This course consists of 5 weeks of labs to help you get familiar with GIS applications. In the class we will use ArcGIS Pro software, other alternatives like QGIS are much alike, with some functions labeling differently. By the end of the class, all students should be very familiar with core GIS application in ArcGIS Pro, which could be easily adapted to QGIS. This course also looks at how to make GIS useful to urban planners – this means that a large part of the class focuses on the tasks that urban planners will face in general.
This course is 1.5 credits.