About Diana Sinton

A geographer with long-term interests in GIS, spatial thinking, and being part of educational communities. I also blog at dianamaps.com, and Twitter is @dianamaps.

Geospatial Modeling Environment (GME) grew out of Hawth’s Tools, a collection of tools that provided welcome and easy functionality with an ArcGIS-interoperable toolbar.  It has always been optimal for environmental and ecological work, but its functionality can be applied to many other application areas. Now a stand-along package, with all of the original bits and more. It has software dependencies on both ArcGIS and R; see the download page for more information.

GRASS, Geographic Resources Analysis Support System. The original open source GIS package, remembered fondly – and not so fondly – for the challenges a user would experience.  But this isn’t your father’s GRASS.  New and improved, and increasingly popular world-wide, with resources and tutorials available in multiple languages.

IDRISI, a long-standing product of Clark Labs, integrates traditional GIS functionality – focusing on raster-based analyses – with additional digital image processing opportunities.  Their application areas are particular strong in natural resource management, environmental modeling, and related land planning and analysis.  Their use in GIS classrooms is not as widespread as other platforms, but loyal customers abound.

P.S.  IDRISI is not an acronym, but rather a tribute to Muhammad al-Idrisi, the 12th century Islamic geographer and cartographer.

This course introduces students to the basics of remote sensing, characteristics of remote sensors, and remote sensing applications in academic disciplines and professional industries. Emphasis is placed on image acquisition and data collection in the electromagnetic spectrum and data set manipulations. This course is designed for geographic information systems (GIS) students interested in imagery analysis.  We use both ArcGIS and ENVI-EX.

This is a hybrid class, combining a once/week meeting with many online activities. This course will provide the skills and knowledge to create basic spatial data and GIS maps. It also lays the foundation for students who want to be employed as a GIS Technician or who want to pursue a degree or certificate and it prepares students for entry-level careers.