[MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to Fundamentals of GIS. In this lesson I'm going to give you a brief introduction to GIS but not an overly technical one. We're going to focus, instead, on why GIS is really exciting and why you might want to learn how to work with it. In the next lesson will give you a more concrete understanding of GIS, but for now I just want you to get excited. This lecture is safe to skip if you're in a rush, but if you stick around to the end I hope I can make you as excited about GIS as I am. To introduce GIS I'd like to tell you how I came across it. When I was in school I was sort of an amateur software developer. It wasn't my focus, but something I did for fun. And I liked to solve problems by automating them with software. For a class I read this paper, the details of which are lost to me now, but it involves studying migratory birds. And they discussed breaking up the world into a large grid of cells to track movement of them, or something like that. And here's where I got this brilliant idea. What if I could make software that made that easy? What if you could have a simple piece of software that let you paint on your computer, sort of like Microsoft Paint, but you'd have these layers and then you could run mathematical functions comparing or combining the layers? Some software that let you understand data in a geographic context. That would be so cool. I was thinking small at this point, but still thought I had an idea that would be useful at least to a few thousand people or something. I mentioned my roommate, and he said, that sounds a lot like GIS. In a sort of matter of fact way like, yeah, that's a good idea and they already have it. Looking it up, I discovered just how important this software already was in shaping the modern world and how many disciplines already rely on it. So much of what we interact with matters in part because of where it is or what's around it. And people had been building these types of tools for decades. That's what I want to show you right now. The many ways to understand the world and your own work in it with GIS. Let's start with that ubiquitous technology in many of your pockets, the smartphone. I'd argue that the GPS chip in those phones is nearly as critical to their usefulness as the persistent connection to the Internet. We're always using our devices to understand what's around us. To find a nearby place to eat, or a place to buy something we need. Or we might be touring and trying to find things to do, and then we need to find out how to get there, so we'll use the mapping feature on the phone. These are all core components of GIS. Where these places are, how you're location relates to them, and then how to get there on a complex transportation network. An extension of this technology that takes it out of the smartphone navigation realm and into the desktop GIS realm, is to combine this information about our road networks with population information. And use it to figure out where to put resources, such as warehouses or storefronts for your business, so that they're accessible by customers. GIS can also help us solve other types of routing problems. A classic one in my line of work is, where does the water go? We know water flows downhill, but we need data to tell us where downhill is on a landscape scale. Once we have that information for an area, we can figure out where rivers form by figuring out the common locations that water runoff occurs. This can help in everything from determining flood risk and choosing town locations, to figuring out how much water is available for an area. A utility might take that information and combine it with current population information and estimates for growth in a town and use it for capacity planning of their infrastructure. They can then use GIS software to determine what kinds of pipes they need and where they should run in order to most efficiently deliver their water and enable proper maintenance. Other people who run that same town can use GIS to help make sure it's the kind of town people want to live in by planning out the communities and making sure that growth is directed to the areas that the community wants it to be in. This is typically called land use planning and it's a common GIS use case. Sometimes it's a town's urban planners who use it to map out the zones in a town and where industry and commercial and residential development should occur. And other times it's crowdsourced and the planners invite the citizens in to use specialized GIS software to say how they want to see their town grow. At the edges of these towns are farmers who are using GIS and remote sensing to determine how to maximize the yield of their crops. By monitoring soil conditions and capturing aerial images that can help assess plant health, they can determine where they may need to increase watering or scale it back. And whether or not they may need to amend their soil. Meanwhile, a migratory bird uses that farm as a temporary stop in its migration. A non-profit volunteer takes notes of what birds are in the area, and enters it into a spacial database. The non-profit then builds maps that show the range of the species, and these go in books and online publications to help birders and members of the general public identify and connect with the birds. In the county or state government, an economist may be interested in what crops the farmer is are choosing to grow in order to accurately estimate economic output across regions. They can use this to determine what kinds of jobs and training are needed in a given area, understand how the value of that land is changing when production changes, predict tax revenue, and direct funds for infrastructure. That data's also passed off to members of the emergency management agencies. They keep track of incidents of floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, and this information can help them estimate and prevent human and economic losses from these types of disasters. Even with all these stories, we're still only scratching the surface of what you can do with GIS. But what really excites me is that it seems like so much of the world now understands the importance of location. There's an old saying that you never really understand something until you understand how it relates to something you already know. This is the crux of spacial information, referencing our data to other locations in the real world. To almost any important fact we can add context by knowing where something occurred. Spacial information opens up a whole world of possible new questions or interesting answers when added to an organization's other data, and that's something that's rapidly occurring right now. We're already witnessing a generation of people who grow up with location information in their pockets. There are many directions that information can take you. One direction is what you learn in this class, which is to analyze location data. I do think that it will become so important to be able to analyze location data that the next generation will learn the basics of GIS the way that my generation learned how to use spreadsheets. Again, I think all this is really exciting and I hope it illustrates that GIS isn't just one thing. It's a general set of technologies and a way to think about data that open up exciting, new possibilities. I'm even more excited about GIS now than I was when I thought I came up with idea many years ago. It's getting more interesting and more powerful every year. I'm glad that you're here to learn how, so let's go get started.
