GIS DAY
Nov 1, 2018

Schedule for GIS Day:
9:00 - 9:30 am Coffee Social & Poster Setup (STEW 206 & 214)
9:30 –10:00 am Lightning Talks (STEW 206)
10:00 –11:00 am Keynote: GIS for natural resources management at United Nation (STEW 206) Dr. Nicolas Picard, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Live Stream
11:00am–12:20pm Presentations (STEW 206) Spatial Humanities: What is and What Can it Be. Prof. Sorin Adam Matei, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Education, College of Liberal Arts Race and Spatial Humanities Prof. Kim Gallon, Assistant Professor of History Forest structural diversity as a predictor of ecosystem function in North America Dr. Elizabeth LaRue, Forestry and Natural Resources My laptop takes forever, now what! Eric Adams, ITaP Research Computing
12:20 –1:30 pm Career Lunch (STEW 279) (RSVP only)
1:30 – 2 pm Poster Presentations (STEW 214)
2:00 – 4:00 pm Round Table Discussions (STEW 214)

GIS day was a huge help in describing different GIS applications and teaching me what GIS is really all about. I learned different perspectives of GIS from a few different professional resources throughout the day, and thought about GIS in different ways than I have before. The keynote speaker Dr. Nicolas Picard had a very interesting take on GIS. At times it was a little hard to understand what he was talking about for a few reasons. First of all, he was very soft spoken and he wasn't utilizing his microphone, so it was difficult to hear him. Second, he had a difficult accent to understand. Third, he went into topics that were not common knowledge to the group listening and did not provide enough background information on some important key topics that he assumed we knew about. What I did like about Dr. Picard's talk was that he included slides that showed what lessons were learned from the different mistakes people made gathering and analyzing GIS data (See figures from GIS Day). The best topic that related to me with Dr. Picard's talk was when he covered using GIS to manage forest genetic resources. He spoke about how to define geographical marginality and how instead of using just one approach there should be multidimensional approaches to gathering this information. His emphasis for that segment was "GIS is a technical tool to address all dimensions of sustainable forest management" which he says makes it an essential tool for policy development to forest monitoring.
The next speaker that was one of my personal favorites was Professor Sorin Matei. He was taking GIS to the next level taking programs and research that had already been done and improving them with GIS technology. He talked about the Orbis Stanford project which is a geospatial network model of the Roman world. (http://orbis.stanford.edu/). There are other maps that show locations that model the Roman world but the Stanford project improved these other maps by giving information using GIS that would give the viewer "environmental constraints that governed the flow of people, goods, and information." He showed us that you can take maps and information that are already out there and improve them using GIS data.
Professor Kim Gallon had a very interesting Ethics view on GIS. She stated that GIS was numbing people to the fact that those figures and representations show did not properly capture what they really stood for. He examples included showing a GIS model of boats of slaves coming from Africa in the early 1800's to America, Central America, and South America. She stated that those little dots moving across the screen were taking away from what they each stood for because people have a hard time thinking about the facts that each of those dots represented a number of real human lives. She thinks that GIS is not the best way to interpreter all information because it destroys the ethics point of view for some viewers.
I think that these 3 talks were the all important for understanding GIS. These talks were the ones that peaked my interest the most, and were relate able to me. All GIS can relate to UAS work that we do. I think it is also important to not forget about the root of the information that GIS is portraying just like Professor Kim Gallon said. If we are using GIS to show data than we should be sure to properly label and identify all points of interest so that the viewer can truly see what we are trying to display for them. I think that Professor Sorin also had some great points, saying that it doesn't matter if the information already exists, it can be improved and expanded on even more, and we can do that with drones and the technology that we have. Even if a map is already made, drones can help with GIS information using ground points, and proper labeling to assist improving maps. I think that the keynote speaker Dr. Picard had good information on multi-disciplinary approaches showing that we can always take different approaches to get different or better results. I also enjoyed the fact that he showed were others could have improved on some GIS projects because learning from others mistakes can be useful!