Instructor: Steven Manson, Department of Geography Office: 473 Social Sciences, West Bank Phone: (612) 625-4577 Email: manson "at" umn.edu Office hours: see the teaching page Prerequisites: Geog 3511/5511 or GIS 5555 and Geog 3561/ 5561 Instructor consent otherwise. Course URL: www.geog.umn.edu/courses/5565 Credit: 3 units
Class meetings: Tuesday, 130-400p (Blegen Hall 445 and 455, West Bank), Spring 2010. After the Spring 2010 offering, the course will be available next in Fall 2011. Materials: All readings are availabe for free in electronic format.

Subject. Geographic information science and allied fields such as spatial analysis and cartography are increasingly used to understand coupled human-environment systems, their patterns and dynamics, and their interactions with the broader world.

Students. Students in this course have tended to come from across the social, natural, and information sciences with no clear majority in any one area. This distribution makes for a lively and challenging meeting of the minds. The course is oriented towards Masters, MGIS, or PhD students. Advanced undergraduates are invited to speak with the instructor to determine if they would find the course appropriate to their educational goals.

Purpose. This course expands on aspects of GISc and statistics covered by previous courses. It is designed to introduce ways in which GISc can be used to explore human-environment systems by gaining hands-on experience with advanced methods in spatial analysis and modeling of human-environment systems.

Goals. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to use GISc to explore the patterns and dynamics of human-environment interactions such as urbanization, habitat preservation, and deforestation. Depending on student orientation, this course can be used to gain insight into the technical underpinnings of introductory spatial analysis and databases, complement on-going research, or provide an applied focus for spatial analysis.

Prior experience. Students should be proficient in GIS, basic mathematics, and standard statistical methodology including descriptive statistics and bivariate regression. As noted above in the prerequisites, this translates into having at least one statistics course and the Principles of GIS course or its equivalent. Students without this experience fare poorly in this course.

Structure. This is an intensive hands-on class with a focus on reading, discussion, and applications. This translates into 30% Lecture, 20% Discussion, 50% Laboratory.