Thursday, January 13, 2011

Applications of GIS


I think my mind is finally losing the haze of winter break, and I'm also back in class. Along with the Stats course I'm taking with Ben (which is requiring me to brush up on my calculus), I'm in an intermediate GIS class.

GIS (Geographic Information Systems/Science) is a really exciting field of study, and I'm happy to be incorporating it into my work. We live in a globalized society and visualizing space is important for understanding what is going on in certain areas. For example, you can map the distribution of biodiversity and visualize the "hotspots" around the world.


For my work in the ALE Lab, I will use landscape data of the areas surrounding my field sites. My focus will be on land use, such as buildings, turf grass, other sorts of lawns, roads, etc. Using GIS technology I can analyze how different land uses may be affecting spider community composition within a particular urban patch. May the presence of many buildings preclude spider establishment because ballooning spiderlings can't pass through? Maybe different types of greenery in the surrounding area are better than others for maintaining spiders (think of corporate lawns sprayed with pesticides compared to parks). These sorts of questions can be analyzed using GIS and thinking of data spatially.

Maybe one day little transmitters can be attached to ballooning spiders and they could be tracked along the landscape. That would be pretty neat (and difficult).

P.S. Here's a good video about how spiders balloon.

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