Geographic Information SYstem and Remote Sensing Facilities

Facilities

The department is home to two GIS/Remote Sensing labs that are supported by our own 10+ terabyte server, individual work stations, reflected and transparency scanners, plotters, digitizers, and a state of the art teaching lab. Software used include: ESRI’s ArcGIS, MANIFOLD, ERDAS IMAGINE, ENVI, Petra, SysStat, and several university supported data management and processing suites. We collaborate with the USM Gulf Coast Geospatial Center and the USM 3-D Visualization Center/Geospatial Lab at NASA’ Stennis Center. The department also maintains Trimble and Garmin GPS Receivers, optical transits, a zoom transfer scope, and four-wheel drive trucks and four wheelers for field data collection.

What We Do

Geography being spatial in nature, GIS and Remote Sensing can be used to answer questions that are dependent upon locational distribution of certain phenomena or object, such as: “How many people live within 100 miles of US coastline? Which of my properties are in hazardous areas? How many people are served by a certain health facility? What is the shortest route to an evacuation shelter?” Some of the current ongoing research are as follows:

• Environmental analysis (identification of pollution sources, determination of residents impacted by chemical spreading) e.g. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• Network analysis (evacuation route determination) e.g. Department of Transportation (DOT)
• Facilities management (modeling utility provision to communities) e.g. Department of Energy (DOE)
• Emergency management (identification potential of hazard impact areas from storm surge) e.g. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
• Decision Making (Development of Decision Support System to enable mitigation and preparedness from future hazard events)
• Change detection (Land cover and land use change analysis)
• Bio-geography (Ecological studies and vegetation analysis)

Updated 10/14/09