GEO 425/525

Introduction to Geographic Information Systems

and Remote Sensing

Fall, 2004

PURPOSE: The purpose of this course is to introduce students to Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which have become perhaps the most important new tools for dealing with spatially distributed data in a broad range of fields. We shall concentrate, in this course, on the applications of GIS in research in geography, geology, environmental science, and natural resources. Because the overwhelming majority of these applications use data derived from remotely sensed imagery, the majority of our data sources will be from remote sensing.

The course includes both a lecture and a laboratory. The lecture portion of the course will present the theoretical aspects of GIS. The laboratory will provide hands-on experience with two industry-standard packages: ArcGIS and ERDAS Imagine. The former of these is primarily oriented to vector applications; the latter is oriented primarily to raster applications. They share a considerable amount of code and have developed in parallel with each other. The goal of the lecture portion of the course is to provide a broad introduction of Remote Sensing and GIS as fields; it will deal with both raster-logic and vector- logic GIS systems and the relationship between remotely sensed imagery and the data most commonly used in geographic information systems. The laboratory portion is designed both to enable the student both to perform some meaningful analyses of data and to provide a foundation for the student to learn other GIS software packages that he or she may encounter in the future. It will concentrate on raster-logic GIS and its applications to remote sensing, although it will touch on vector-logic GIS as well.

MATERIALS: The course has two textbooks: Geographic Information Systems: an Introduction (3^nd edition), by Tor Bernhardsen, and Introductory Digital Image Processing: A Remote Sensing Perspective (2^nd Edition), by John R. Jensen. These books are available in the CSU Bookstore, and they can also be obtained from Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com for approximately $60 and $70, respectively. These will also be the textbooks for the forthcoming GEO/EVS 427/527: Advanced Topics in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems, which is scheduled to be offered in the Spring. Any investment you make in these textbooks will serve you for both courses.

The laboratory for the course will take place in the Remote Sensing and Multimedia Laboratory of the Department of Biological, Geological, and Environmental Sciences (SR G-71). All files which you will need are either on the department’s computer network or can be obtained from the WorldWide Web.

GRADING: Grades will be based on 3 separate sources: Your portfolio of materials done for individual laboratories will be 40% of your grade. Your final examination will be 35% of your grade. Your sharing of ideas on the on-line course discussion group and in classes will be 25% of your grade.

Laboratories are important. GIS is very much a hands-on activity, and you need to do it in order to learn it. It is for this reason that laboratory work will account for 65% of your grade (i.e. the portfolio and the discussions that stem from your work in the laboratory). Indeed, your final examination will also require hands-on work. You should take this portion of the course quite seriously. You will receive two grades for each laboratory unit: one on the portion of the laboratory going into your portfolio and one on your discussion, both on the on-line discussion group and in the recitation itself. Note that you will benefit from completing the exercises prior to the recitation, so that you can bring hard copy of your results to class, and you will also benefit from contributing new observations and ideas to the on-line discussion group, so that your colleagues can consider your thoughts prior to the recitation.

We will have only one examination in this course. The final examination will a practical exercise that will attempt to integrate all aspects of the course. It will be presented to you as you might be presented with a client who entered your office and requested that you carry out a project dealing with GIS and remote sensing. You will have one week to complete this exercise.

LABORATORY UNITS: Laboratories in this course will all work in the same general fashion. You'll usually receive a handout in the Tuesday afternoon class. In general, this handout will include detailed instructions for the exercise to be done in the laboratory, as well as a specification for materials to be included in your portfolio and a due date. You can do the laboratory work anytime you choose. All work will be done in the BGES multimedia laboratory, Science Research G-71. In general, exercises will be intended to take one week. Some will be shorter, however.

One of the things included in the instructions for the some of the laboratories may be an explanation of the icons or menu selections that you will be dealing with as you carry out the laboratory exercise. You may wish to collect these as references for your use throughout the semester. You should also note that many of the icons represent actions that can also be accomplished using the mouse or keystrokes on the keyboard. I will try to indicate as many of these as possible, but you should learn to keep it in mind that there are often several ways to "skin the cat".

It is to be anticipated that these exercises will raise questions. Indeed it is to be hoped that they will raise questions in your minds that will lead you to experiment. In either case, you should communicate your questions, observations, plans, etc. to the class as a whole. You'll do this using the class discussion group. To access the discussion group, you can use Netscape or Internet Explorer to go to the course discussion group home page (www.bges.csuohio.edu/geo425/dg.htm), and click on the link to the discussion group. You can also click the "access discussion groups" icon on any of the lab computers, then click on the appropriate link.

The format of all of the units in this course is the same. The first part of the unit will contain the detailed instructions for the exercises within the unit. The second part will be a series of questions, which you are to answer on the discussion group prior to the recitation. The questions and observations which you raise and share with your colleagues in the class will serve as the springboard for our discussions in the recitation. Your contributions to the recitations -- both using the discussion group and in your inner-class comments -- will constitute a significant portion of your grade. The third part of each unit will be a specific assignment for your portfolio. At the beginning of the semester, as you are still learning how to use Imagine, these portfolio assignments will be fairly cut and dried. Toward the end of the semester, they will be considerably less so. You should bring the portfolio assignments to the recitation. Again, your having completed them by the time of the recitation will show up in your grade. Your completed portfolio, which will be turned in at the end of the semester, will constitute a significant portion of your grade.

All of the images that you create in this course will be stored on your X: drive. To ensure that nobody's activities screw up other students in the class, you will not be able to store images on any of the other drives used by Imagine.

MEETING SCHEDULE: The course will have two meetings each week, Most new handouts will be passed out at our Tuesday meeting, and assignments will be due on the following Tuesday. Thursday’s meetings will be relatively formal, and they will include an opportunity to work on both lecture and laboratory materials with my active involvement. “Involvement” as used here means discussion and sometimes outright lectures on substantive materials of the exercise, as well as an opportunity for directed help on the exercise.

Note that this course is in a state of flux this year. We will begin with the new material that is being added to the Maps course, and we will be seguéing to a more applied GEO 427 / EVS 527 to be offered in the spring as part of the developing OhioView certificate program in Remote Sensing. This means that the actual use of class meetings may be somewhat looser this year than it has been in the past or will be in the future.

MEETING PLACE: You will attend lectures and carry out the laboratory exercises at any time appropriate to your schedules, in the Multimedia Laboratory, room G-71 of the Science Research Building. The laboratory is available to students all day Monday through Friday while the department is open. Students will also be able to get key cards to get entry into the multimedia laboratory at other times if you do not have them from having taken Maps. 

GRADUATE STUDENTS: Students registered in EVS 525 will be required, in addition to the portfolio and the final examination, to prepare a project design for an application of Geographic Information Systems or remote sensing that would be applicable to a research project in their field. Where possible, this should be an application relevant to their thesis or dissertation.

SCHEDULE: The schedule below is subject to change. The “Tuesday” listed in the schedule is the Tuesday which corresponds to the week in the semester. “Chapters in Text” are in the Bernhardsen text. Additional assignments will also be made in the Jensen text.

SCHEDULE