Showing posts with label GIS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GIS. Show all posts

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Using GIS & Remote Sensing to Measure Urban Sustainability



The environmental impact of human activity on irreplaceable natural resources has set off a national chain of events and a need to evaluate feasible sustainability solutions.

Issues that were once scholarly debates are now urgent concerns, from global warming caused by greenhouse gases to energy conservation, people the world over are taking notice and learning what they can do to reduce pollutants and waste, and tap into renewable energy sources to preserve our precious natural resources.

Smart growth and urban sustainability are such hot topics that they are now becoming part of public policy and stimulus money is being used for green initiatives. Many of these initiatives are focused on renewable energy resources, green jobs, green cities, and energy efficiency. However, talk has only just begun on how States, County and local governments will go about creating and implementing “green” action plans, determining baseline conditions and land use, and collecting the geospatial data necessary to determine the costs of such action plans.

However, not much has been said about how and where powerful new geospatial technologies can help to achieve these goals. We would like to share how we can be of service to those of you who are trying to align your purpose with many others now investing in their own green cities.

See NCDC's new capabilities brochure here.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Understand | Communicate | Collaborate

I read a great article in the Winter 2006/2007 ArcNews recently. I want to republish one section of it here because it so clearly defines the purpose of GIS in the world today.

GIS Is a New Medium

"GIS is becoming a new medium for humans to understand, communicate, and collaborate.

GIS is being used to model the physical and cultural knowledge of our world, breaking it down into components and subsystems, providing us with systematic knowledge, and integrative framework, analytic methods, and intuitive visualization. GIS is attractive to humans because it responds to both cognitive as well as intuitive dimensions of understanding. GIS creates order and meaning. It is helping us define interconnections and interdependencies, and it provides a broad understanding of nature and human ecology.

GIS is influencing how we see things and how we respond. It is helping us build a common understanding, creating a sense of engagement, providing greater science and logic, and improving accuracy and realism. Finally, because GIS is integrating with real-time data or "sources", it is providing immediacy." (Dangermond, ArcNews, 2007)

It is truly an exciting time to be working in GIS. A running story at our office about our company inception is that "we were creating a new application a week" using GIS and Remote Sensing. With all of the questions that can be answered using GIS today, this rate of solution creation is quite realistic.