Physical geographer and landscape ecologist Mike Binford uses remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) techniques to explore how environmental change interacts with human culture. Binford came to the UF Department of Geography from Harvard in 1997, but he is no newcomer to Gainesville. Binford worked at the University of Florida Natural History Museum from 1980-1986, during which time he met and married his wife, Mary Lowry-Binford, and had two daughters.
Cn: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) seems to be a common buzzword these days on campus in a wide range of fields from ecology to business development. What are GIS?
MB: Everyone is familiar with word processing, and most people are now familiar with image processing--using Photoshop for example. It's the same concept with GIS, except rather than text and pictures, GIS are the hardware, software, and methods for processing, storing and handling spatial data; for manipulating and analyzing those data; and for displaying the data in ways that communicate with other people. Some people call it a "higher order map."
Cn: Where do the spatial data come from?
MB: Many places, including gathering the data oneself, federal and state agencies responsible for land management and geological and biological surveys, and private sources. One of the most useful and inexpensive sources is from satellite remote sensing, where sensors on orbiting satellites measure the reflection from the earth's surface of different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. These data can be used to form a digital image that GIS people use to interpret surface cover, including types of vegetation and bodies of water.
Cn: But you can use GIS without a satellite?
MB: Without a satellite and without a computer even. A student I had a couple of years ago in a GIS class told me that his father owned and managed a restaurant in Chicago for years. He'd talk to his customers and find out where they lived and he'd go back and put a pin in a map he had of the city. After awhile, he had several hundred pins in the map...so he knew which neighborhoods were already supportive and which he might want to market to. That's an application of a GIS--a way of storing, handling, analyzing and displaying data.
But computerization makes one able to handle enormous amounts of data, like the census bureau data, which contain, among other things, population counts for census tracts, statistics on economic conditions within the tracts, and all the roads of the United States.
Cn: What are some of the most common uses for GIS techniques?
MB: GIS can be used to monitor things like population growth, deforestation, fluctuations in bodies of water, etc. We can model environmental systems in a spatially explicit manner, and test hypotheses about spatial relationships between similar and dissimilar variables. We can examine how the land's surface has changed over time. Since satellite remote sensing has been commercially available for 25 years, we can compare current images with earlier ones to assess how things have changed, and use the information to test ideas about landscape dynamics.
So GIS is in demand in many disciplines, including geography, ecology and environmental science, landscape architecture and anthropology. In another example, my colleague Grant Thrall (Geography) is interested in business applications of GIS. His students have graduated and gone on to work for people like Blockbuster Entertainment, searching for the next best place for another Blockbuster outlet. They use GIS data from the census bureau on each voting districts' average income and overlay this with the road network. You can easily calculate driving distances from every desirable point to find the best location.
Cn: How do landscape ecologists like you use GIS to gauge human impact on the land?
MB: For one example, you wouldn't want to put a housing development on a steep slope or on a place that's a recharge area for an aquifer, and that's where GIS and remote sensing can contribute to planning. With a good inventory of the landscape--maps of soils, vegetation and topography--you can undertake suitability analyses based on a number of criteria defined ahead of time, and then you can sort through the system and find out where the suitable, capable places are. You can take it further and use GIS to model the systems to answer hypothetical questions...If so much material is dumped on the land over here, and it migrates through the soil and the aquifer at such and such a rate, how fast will it come up over there? Or, how will changing the infiltration capacity of the soil's surface--by converting a forest into a parking lot say--affect the streamflow downstream, especially during periods of flood?
Cn: Who solicits these suitability studies? Are developers required to seek out such studies?
MB: The EPA has requirements that you be able to show that whatever activity you're carrying out will not add to the pollutant load of streams, or you must have a permit for that pollutant load. They've been working on some GIS-based models--one called BASINS and a few others--and while none is required by law yet, it speeds the permitting process to go through and show your proposal has minimal impact on the stream downhill.
Who's requesting GIS? Anybody with interests in the Earth's surface. A lot of environmental organizations [Binford has worked with the Nature Conservancy in California], governmental organizations like the Departments of Defense, Interior, Transportation, and other agencies that manage areas of land; research units of the EPA, NOAA, USGS; many state agencies such as the water management districts in Florida and agriculture departments in many states; urban and regional planners, and others.
And it's effective, cheap technology, and so inexpensive that GIS is also increasingly used by indigenous groups or informal settlements in developing countries--many times assisted by a non-governmental organization (NGOs)--to map their territories. When these groups are challenged by a government or a group of people who want to move into an area, if they have well-done maps, very often they'll prevail over the challenge because nobody else has the spatial data on where those boundaries are. GIS are wonderful systems for displaying boundaries and producing good maps that are convincing to other groups of people.
In fact, Janis Alcorn with World Wildlife Fund has done a study that includes well over a hundred different cases where mapping helped defend indigenous people.
Cn: What do most of your students with GIS experience do after graduation?
MB: Some go to graduate school, but many work for state or federal government, or for engineering and environmental consulting firms. One this year is going on to the Peace Corps, many work for water management or planning agencies, and some go on to use GIS in the business world.
Cn: With so many disciplines on campus using GIS, are you coordinating efforts with other units outside of CLAS?
MB: Yes. We worked together with Scot Smith of the Geomatics group in Civil Engineering, Paul Zwick of Urban and Regional Planning, Mark Brown of Environmental Engineering, Tony Shih of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, and Loukas Arvanitis of the School of Forest Resources and Conservation, to coordinate UF's new interdisciplinary concentration in GIS [now approved]. MA and PhD students in colleges all over UF are able to pursue a five-course concentration in GIS, which requires training in GIS, remote sensing and spatial statistics both inside and outside of their fields. The utility of GIS is so widespread--all these different units need it and use it. If you were to limit GIS teaching and research to any one unit it would be even worse than limiting spreadsheet use to accounting [laughs]...or word processor use to English.
--Jane Gibson
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