Within our first week of GEOG 479, we went over the general structure of the course and the topics we will be covering in the future. We will be exploring three broad topics-landscape ecology, health and crime, finding geographic commonalities in their spatial analysis. Learning to see geography as a common factor in the analysis of subjects that at first seem too distant to be related seems to be the takeaway point of GIScience.
FRAGSTATS was also introduced this week. Fragstats is a software program that computes landscape metrics for categorical map designs. We will be using it in our first lab to see how patterns and interactions of a landscape changes over time. Fragstats is a useful program for the study of landscape patterns and mosaic. A program that is able to do such an analysis is critical because landscapes do not exist in isolation. They exist within context regardless of the scale defined, housed in a larger landscape within larger landscapes. While keeping patterns, processes, places, people and perspectives in mind, we will analyze landscapes and changes to them in next week’s lab using the background skills we went over this week.