Principles of managing scarce resources in a world where everyone faces tradeoffs across both time and space. Focuses on the relationship between globalization processes and changing patterns of locational advantages, production, trade, population, socioeconomic and environmental grace and sustainability. (Human Geography)

This course covers the statistical modeling of spatial data and data analysis that are most useful to geographers and others who use spatial data. It provides the student with more advanced methods with an emphasis on practical techniques for problem solving. Home assignments are designed to help the student understand the fundamental concepts and principles in depth and allow the student to gain experience in the use of S-Plus statistical software and two powerful extensions of ArcGIS: Spatial analyst, and Geostatistical analyst. There is a $40.00 lab fee for this course.

An introduction to programming and scripting for intermediate GIS users. The fundamental concepts of computer programming will be introduced within the Geoprocessing framework in ArcGIS primarily using Python. Basic concepts of object-oriented programming and scripting will be presented. Students will develop skills in programming techniques to explore, manipulate and model spatial data using the Geoprocessor methods.

Lidar, also known as laser scanning, is an active remote sensing tool that can produce high-resolution point clouds. Lidar is being applied to problems such as terrain modeling, biomass estimation, change detection, feature extraction, and measuring tree canopy. Topics covered are fundamentals of lidar, current developments in lidar technology, and different applications where lidar is being used. Students will get hands-on learning about lidar data management, processing, and analysis.

Students will learn to use open source GIS tools like QGIS, GeoServer and PostGIS to collect, store, analyze, serve and visualize spatial data on the web (e.g., OpenStreetMap Data). This course will help students understand the backend of web mapping services like Google map, Bing Map etc. by using open source GIS server to build Google Map-like web mapping services, including data services (WFS), visualization services (WMS), and processing services(WPS). Previous exposure to GIS environment and basic concepts of web server will be helpful but not required for learning in this course.