FREC 480: GIS in Natural Resource Management
COURSE SYLLABUS

The class meets Tuesdays & Thursdays 11AM--12:15PM in the Geography Dept. GIS lab, 203 Pearson Hall.
You can use the super  secret security code to get into the GIS lab any time the building is open (M-F until 10PM, Saturdays 10AM-6PM and Sundays noon-10PM). Various classes are held in the lab, but most instructors will allow you to work quietly at an unused workstation during their classes.

This course teaches GIS concepts, functions and applications via hands-on lab projects. It is entirely lab-based; there are no quizzes or exams.  100% of your course grade will be determined by the completeness and correctness of your lab projects.  Here's my grading philosophy.

All lab projects are to be submitted as web pages; I will teach you basic web authoring techniques during the first three weeks of class.  These are not group projects; they are individual projects.  You may consult with other students on how to tackle specifric aspects of your project, but all the project material that you submit must be entirely your own work. Your final assignment is to write a grant proposal to apply GIS tools to a research topic of your choosing. This is to be a proposal, not actual data collection or analysis, but I recommend that you discuss the topic with me and start researching GIS methods for it by mid-semester.

You will be posting your projects on UD's Copland server (udel.edu), and will need additional disk quota on Copland to store everything. Request a disk quota change to obtain 200MB of quota from IT/NSS (you will have to log in for authentication).   It will take 24 hours for your additional quota to appear. (To check your quota allocation and usage, type "quota -v" at the copland prompt.)

There is no textbook to buy, but you must buy yourself a USB flash drive--at least 4 GB. You can often find these on sale at Staples or Office Depot for about $10. You are solely responsible for keeping track of your GIS project data. Do not store your data on the lab machines.

The primary GIS software used in this course is ArcGIS v10. I will supply you with a free student version with a one-year license that you may install on your own PC. To run ArcGIS on a Mac you will need Apple's Boot Camp (free) and your own copy of Microsoft Windows (special pricing through UD/IT). You should be able to complete almost all of the course assignments with the student version of ArcGIS.

Additional useful (and free!) software that you can download and use:

• GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a supurb image editor that replicates all the best tools in Adobe PhotoShop.
• SSH UNIX terminal and file-transfer clients are available from UDeploy. These utilities will let you work from home on your project websites and transfer map image files to them. The Fetch 5 FTP client and tn3270 telnet client are equivalent utilities for Macs available on UDeploy.
• You can write and edit your webpages directly on the Copland server with UNIX's Pico editor (quicker, but no mouse), or use Windows Notepad or another plain-text editor like Notepad++ and then FTP your file to copland.
• 7-Zip is a free file archiver/extractor program that beats Windows, WinZip, etc.
• Finally, ArcGIS isn't the only GIS in town. Nice alternatives include IDRISI developed at Clark University, as well as some free packages: GRASS and Quantum GIS which have large international user bases.

At the end of this course you will have a working familiarity with GIS data structures, data sources, spatial logic, and basic vector and raster analytics. The course projects will give you a broad understanding of how GIS can be applied to real-world resource management problems. While the course uses ESRI's ArcGIS, it will reference other GIS programs as well, and is not intended to be software-specific. The GIS skills you develop in this class should be readily transferable to other problems and other GIS packages.

CLASS SCHEDULE (subject to change):

1. class overview | basic GIS concepts | ArcMap overview
2. Getting started in ArcMap
3. Writing web pages
4. Projections & coordinate systems
5. Data management strategies; tables, charts and map composition
6. importing external data to the GIS
7. (Vector) feature manipulations
8. Spatial statistics and interpolation methods
9. (Raster) spatial analysis
10. Terrain models and 3D rendering
11. Hydrologic modeling
12. Remote sensing
13. Georeferencing and image analysis
14. GPS intro & walkabout
15. Project wrap-ups

"I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called 'Mister,' thank you very much."