Your final assignment is to write a GIS research project proposal. Pick any natural resource management issue or topic for which GIS would be useful. Your proposal should include the following components:

1. Background: What is the history of the problem? What is the current public policy context? What is the current situation? What makes this problem worth researching? How important is the spatial context of the problem, and what makes it suitable for analysis with a GIS?
2. Literature Review: Summarize prior research on this topic or related topics, including any that used GIS. Review the strengths and limitations of some representative prior studies.
3. Hypotheses: What specific questions are you trying to answer?
4. Data: What data will you need? Which are already available in digital form? How will you obtain and incorporate into your GIS any necessary data that are not already in digital form? How will your data be structured--as raster or vector?
5. Methods: What procedures will you use to do the analysis? Be specific. What are the strengths of these methods? What are their weaknesses?
6. Anticipated Results: What do you expect to find?
7. Policy Applications: How might your research results be used to improve public policies related to this problem?
8. Budget: Assuming you are starting with no computer equipment or software, include a project budget specifying anticipated costs of hardware, software, labor and other needs. Specify total hours required for the job at $25-35/hour. You can use the UD Computer Warehouse pricelist for hardware prices. Check out the 1996 GIS World Sourcebook or any recent issue of GIS World for GIS software options; you may have to call one or two vendors for pricing info.
9. Timeframe: include a project schedule.