Integrating GIS into an Environmental Science Program
How can Geographic Information Systems (GIS) be effectively woven into a university environmental sciences program? This example represents ways in which geotechnologies (GIS, remote sensing, GPS/GNSS, and web mapping) can help students put their environmental interests into action by fostering skills in data collection, mapping, analysis, and communication in tandem with an ethic of caring for and protecting the water, air, soil, plants, animals, and ecosystems of Planet Earth and the people who dwell there. These strategies could be used in other universities, or in technical, tribal, and community college programs, and even in secondary school classrooms where there is a particular focus on outdoor education, field work, and STEM.
A sample of the investigations in the GIS course described in this article.
All environmental issues—water quality, habitat loss, energy, climate, natural hazards, invasive species, and many more—take place somewhere, affecting people’s lives as well as their environmental surroundings. In addition, these issues often exhibit spatial patterns that can be mapped and analyzed, and require the analysis of data in the form of 2D and 3D maps, aircraft and satellite imagery, real time data feeds from the Internet of Things, and much more. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is an exciting way for students to put their interest and passion for all things about the Earth and the Environment into action in ways that are in demand in the workplace by nonprofit organizations, government agencies, academia, and private industry and incredibly relevant to our 21st Century world. GIS provides theoretical foundations and practical applications for social and ecological problem-solving.
One approach to integrating GIS into an environmental program at a university is through a course I developed and taught through the Au Sable Institute. Through a series of readings, videos, and hands-on exercises covering a variety of environmental themes, issues, and scales, the course invites the students to learn the fundamentals modern mapping, including projections, symbology, classification, and analysis. Students build their own web mapping applications, including dashboards and story maps. They gain skills and confidence to empower them to be able to conduct their own field studies and use maps as analytical tools to build a brighter, more sustainable, more resilient tomorrow. I am sharing the syllabus as an attachment with you in several formats so that you can modify it for your own use, and I will shortly publish the entire course contents as a story maps collection.
The six course learning outcomes are to:
- Identify ways in which GIS, maps, and geo-visualizations are providing a common language and framework for communication and solving problems.
- Apply cartographic design principles such as symbology, color, and classification methods to create, modify, and critically evaluate effective maps and visualizations.
- Analyze environmental and other data spatially with web GIS tools using a variety of techniques, including visualization, filtering, map overlay, routing, mean center, and proximity.
- Demonstrate how to create and map data from spreadsheets, from GPS data, from field surveys, from joining data, and from pre-existing maps.
- Identify how society influences mapping, and how mapping influences society, through data availability, data quality, map projections, crowdsourcing, location privacy, the Internet of Things, and design, and examine the connections between Christian ethics, GIS, and environmental science.
- Create multimedia 2D maps and 3D scenes that effectively communicate an environmental issue, event, or theme, via results of a research investigation.
Purpose: The purpose of this course is to lay a firm foundation for the successful use of GIS by introducing students to the ways that digital maps from GIS can be created, symbolized, and used in visualizations to solve problems and serve as communication tools in environmental science and beyond. Through this course, students gain fundamental skills in cartography and spatial analysis with an environmental focus through hands-on work. But equally importantly, they gain understanding of the technological and societal implications that these tools have on 21st Century society and how students can chart their own pathway forward using these tools and perspectives.
Prerequisites: This course has no prerequisites, other than a desire to learn, an inquisitive mind, and a goal to be a positive change agent in the world 😊. It is advisable, however, for students to be comfortable with operating a web browser, understanding the difference between file types (DOCX, JPG, PNG, XLSX), and be comfortable with managing files and folders on your own device (laptop or tablet).
Required Texts and Materials: Given the rapidly evolving nature of geotechnologies, there is no suitable required text for this course. However, there are required readings and videos for this course, which are given in sequential order in each week of the 5-week course.
Videos: Students will watch and reflect upon a set of 1 to 3 short videos each week that I created.
Readings and Discussions: In the student overview in Populi, the course's Learning Management System (LMS), they find a main set of readings for each week. There are 5 sets of readings total, one set of each week. Videos are sometimes embedded within these readings. Labs (hands-on work with GIS and maps) build on the reading content of each module and allow students to work in a problem-solving mode with the topics raised in the readings. Therefore, I recommend that they work through the readings first before completing the hands on activities (labs) for each week. At the end of each week’s readings, they are asked a short set of questions to respond to in discussion mode so that we can all be learning from each other.
References: Students are provided with a reference list of articles and other resources in this course. I encourage them to feel free to explore these as they have time, or even after this course ends, to keep learning and moving forward. They are not graded on any of these outside readings unless they are included in the main readings for each week.
Labs (Hands-on Activities) and Discussions: Maps and geo-visualizations are inherently so compelling, so visual, and so appropriate for addressing real and serious issues in our world (from population to water, from biodiversity to health, from equity to energy, and more) that each week students have the opportunity to work with data, tools, and maps to address these issues. At the end of each hands-on lab, they are presented with a short set of questions to respond to in a discussion forum. They are often asked to share the URLs of the maps they create in this courses so everyone can see these maps and learn from each student's work.
Quizzes: At the end of each week, students are given a short quiz of 6 questions. Rather than viewing them as a stress-inducing item, I encourage students to use them as a self-assessment opportunity to gauge how much they are learning and moving forward.
Weekly themes: The course runs asynchronously and online for 5 weeks and is organized around the following themes:
Week 1: Get Mapping! Introduction to GIS in Environmental Science
Week 2: Space, Place, and Time.
Week 3: From the Field to the Lab.
Week 4: Surveys, Stories, and Spatial Analysis.
Week 5: The Future is Now.
Each week, students learn core content, develop a set of technical skills, and address a societal issue associated with geotechnologies.
Each week, I present a course map of content, skills, themes, and societal issues that will be investigated; a sample of which is below:
Assessment: I frequently receive questions from the academic community about how course content is assessed using GIS, and for this course, I assessed it this way:
Labs Discussions: 5 labs x 10 points each = 50 points
Readings Discussions: 5 discussions x 5 points each = 25 points
Quizzes: 5 quizzes (each is 6 questions) x 3 points each = 15 points
Implementation Plan: 1 plan x 10 points = 10 points
Total: 100 points
Evaluation
As of 2022, after teaching the course twice, I offer these reflections:
1. Students respond well to the hands-on nature of the course. The hands-on activities and the migration of GIS to the cloud, manifested in ArcGIS Online, made the perfect match.
2. Students respond well to the use of ArcGIS Online. ArcGIS Online provides ways for them to gather field data (we primarily used Survey123), map data, analyze data, and communicate the results of their investigations.
3. ArcGIS Online meshed perfectly with the institute's Learning Management System. In this case, the institute used the Populi LMS, which I found to be very useful to teach on, with embedding capabilities (important in teaching GIS), and not over-engineered: Simple, straightforward, easy-to-learn.
4. The course began during 2021, while COVID was in full swing. Traditionally, Au Sable would offer many of its environmental short courses on its beautiful campus in Michigan, but that obviously wasn't happening in 2021. Offering this course online was a natural fit and continues to work well even after Au Sable resumed its face to face (F2F) offerings. The course as I built it could be easily transformed to a F2F course at any time in the future.
5. The course integrated well with the Institute's environmental mission, helping students to become interested in the institute's other offerings and the environmental offerings on their own campuses. The course also is opening up conversations with the other GIS offerings (currently environmental GIS applications with a focus on UAVs) and how to integrate GIS workflows and tools into other courses on campus (ethics, biology, conservation, and others). GIS has great applicability to any university focused on environmental issues. The recent expansion of the ArcGIS Climate Hub and other environmental tools is only a small piece of the massive amount of initiatives, data, and other resources to come.
This is an excellent illustration of a thoughtful way of integrating GIS into an already-successful environmental science program, starting slowly but powerfully, and building from there. It also shows how GIS augments and enhances any environmental program by aligning to that program's needs.