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Geography 970

Environmental Modeling With GIS

Instructor:

Prof. A-Xing Zhu

Brief Course Description:

This course offers an opportunity to approach environmental modeling problems using GIS techniques. The course focuses on the quantitative similation of processes in physical environments and the spatial extrapolation of these processes using GIS techniques.

The course consists of three components: the discussion of conceptual aspects of physical environmental processes; the conceptual implementation of these processes in the computer environments; and the GIS techniques for parameterizing the physical landscape for the simulation of these processes over large spatial scales.

Students are expected, as part of their term projects, to design computer simulation models of physical processes of their choice.

Objectives:

1) To provide an opportunity for quantitatively analyzing physical environmental processes with the hope of quantitatively predicting the behavours (or impacts) of these processes under a given environmental scenario.

2) To provide students with the appreciation of the complexity of the environmental processes; to show students the limitations of simulating these physical processes over space; and to introduce the existing GIS techniques for dealing with these problems.

In general, this course introduces the problems in environmental modeling with GIS and provides students some basic skills for conducting research in this field. It is hoped that students will continue to devoloping these skills and to conquer the problems in environmental modeling with GIS in their research lives.

Prerequisites:

GEOG 377 and GEOG 325 or their respective equivalents.

Course Syllabus:

(......)

Course Materials:

(Only available at Learn@UW)