Today we went over the basic concept of GIS, starting with the 5P’s: People, Perspectives, Processes, Patterns, and Places. These 5 are deeply interconnected and interact with one another in GIS analysis. The introduction of these 5 components highlights the importance of GIS in a modern world.

The class also introduced the main focal points of the course: landscape ecology, health geography, and crime geography, as well as the tools that we will be using in each. From the tools, it seems that this course will be highly statistical in nature.

Landscape Ecology

Landscape ecology looks at how living organisms interact with their environment, shaping their surrounds while simultaneously being shaped by them. This unit will focus on how landscapes change over time and how this affects the organisms that live in them.

Health Geography

Health geography is the study of health care and diseases in populations. On one hand, health geography looks at how to deal with distribution of health care, such as where to place hospitals and emergency services. ON the other hand, health geography also examines the spread of disease and health conditions, similar to epidemiology. In this field, health geographers map disease outbreaks, track vectors, and use geographical data to better understand how diseases can be prevented or treated.

Crime Geography

Crime geography maps out instances of crime and uses statistics with the aim of predicting and preventing future crimes. Data used in crime analysis is often compared with surrounding data to identify correlations between certain types of crime and certain elements. This was done in lab 3 of 370 where we looked at data for various crimes in Vancouver.