LDAR 5540

Introduction to
Geographic Information Systems:
Mapping and Spatial Analysis in
Landscape Architecture
Course Overview
What is GIS?
 A Geographic Information System
(GIS) integrates hardware, software
and data for capturing, managing,
analyzing and displaying all forms of
geographically referenced
What is GIS?

information.

Definition
 In simpler terms, it is a system that
allows for the georeferencing
(mapping) of data, which makes for a
powerful analytical tool across a wide
spectrum of applications.
What is GIS?

Definition
 Any GIS systems consists of three
basic components working in concert:

• Technology

• Data
What is GIS?

• People

Components
 Nearly every industry makes use of
GIS technology, including:
• banking • cartography
• insurance • agriculture
• defense • conservation
• intelligence • forestry
• education • mining
• economic development • public safety
What is GIS?

• public works • transportation

• public health • ethnography

Industries
 • Banking: home values, fraud monitoring, foreclosures
• K-12 Education: facilities management, vehicle
routing, district boundary mapping
• Public Works: transportation and water infrastructure
monitoring, urban forestry, expansion planning
• Public Health: illness outbreak monitoring,
demographic information targeting
• Agriculture: identification of optimal farmland,
monitoring of crop yields, maps of organic operations
• Transportation: traffic monitoring, infrastructure
What is GIS?

mapping, transportation planning

• Ethnography: mapping ancient trade routes and
natural resources, tracking linguistic patterns

Sample Uses
 GIS Output can take many forms,
both hard copy and digital, including:
• printed maps and diagrams
• map series for presentations
• static web displays
• interactive maps
• vector files for AutoCAD
What is GIS?

• 3D export files for modeling applications

• spreadsheet-ready data tables

GIS Output
 GIS software takes many forms, as both online browsers
and local server-based applications.
What is GIS?

Software
History of GIS
 The roots of GIS are thoroughly embedded in the history of
mapping itself. Even the earliest maps were a form of GIS,
placing people and events in a geographic context.
History of GIS

Mapping
 One of the first instances of a mapped data overlay used for
spatial analysis was in the 1854 London cholera outbreak.
History of GIS

Dr. John Snow

 Mapping the locations of cholera deaths and the locations
of public water pumps revealed the source of the outbreak.
History of GIS

Dr. John Snow

History of GIS

Ian McHarg
 McHarg was the first to document a deliberate process of
assigning values to social and environmental assets.
History of GIS

Asset Values
 By superimposing all the layers, he could identify the areas
with the least social and ecological value.
History of GIS

Mapping Layer Overlays

 McHarg also demonstrated that many types of social
factors could be analyzed and mapped as well.
History of GIS

Social Factors
 With increasing accuracy in mapping and data-collection
technology has come increasing utility in GIS applications.
History of GIS

Remote Sensing
 With improvements in computer technology, information from
data tables and maps could be digitized and georeferenced,
greatly enhancing GIS functionality and applications.
History of GIS

Data Integration
 The first true GIS system was developed by Dr. Roger
Tomlinson in Ottawa, Canada in the 1960s.
History of GIS

http://gisandscience.com/2009/01/25/data-for-decision-42-years-later/

CGIS
 In the late 1970s, the Map Overlay and Statistical System
(MOSS), the first widely-used US government GIS system,
was developed by the Western Energy and Land Use Team
(US Fish & Wildlife Service) in Fort Collins.
History of GIS

MOSS
 In 1969, Jack Dangermond, a graduate of Harvard’s landscape
architecture program and researcher at the school’s
Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis,
founded the Environmental Systems Research Institute.
History of GIS

In 1982, ESRI released the first version of ArcGIS, which is

now the industry standard GIS software.

Jack Dangermond
 This 1960s photo of researchers at the Harvard Laboratory for
Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis shows Jack
Dangermond, second from right. Also pictured on the far left is
his colleague, Carl Steinitz, from whom I learned GIS.
History of GIS

Harvard