Problems
and tasks in analysis, management, and planning of spatial units of
different sizes like gardens or parks, towns, landscapes or whole countries
are of growing importance. The enormous development of computer technology
and software has made possible to solve some of these problems and tasks
with new tools. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) are the keywords for this. They can be powerful to extend our thinking
and speed up analyses, and ease the production of new maps or tables, which
in course might induce new ideas, new solutions, and help to communicate our
results.
The book of exercises is
designed to help students of landscape architecture to understand the
basic concept of GIS by working with GIS software. However, the exercises
are additional teaching material to an introductory lecture on GIS which
is given in the Faculty of Environmental Management and Agriculture at the
University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland. Therefore, deeper
theoretical instructions are missing in this volume ─ they are presented
elsewhere. Furthermore, because the exercises are included into a 30 hours
lecture, to be held in one semester, they are certainly not covering all
possibilities of GIS, nor are they exploring the selected topics to full
depth.
The exercises
are designed to practise basic operations in a professional GIS software
environment. After working through the pages, you should feel familiar
with the underlying idea of spatial data display and analysis. The
training data sets are designed to support you in this learning phase, and
because of this aim, they are sometimes reduced in
complexity and might seem rather 'simple'. As well, you will be introduced
to a very limited, however fundamental, set of possibilities within the
GIS software. Every chapter contains some tasks and finishes with review
questions. A key for the review questions is given at the end of the book.
I hope, the exercises will be helpful to
get a first and illustrative idea of the concept and some possibilities of
GIS. However, I would be glad, if they serve as a starting point only ─ a
starting point of a longer journey into the interesting topic of
computer-aided spatial data management.
Contents: 1. Display
of Data Layers and Measurements; 2. Display of Raster Layers; 3. Display
of Vector Layers; 4. Analysis of Attribute Data; 5. Georeferencing and
Resampling; 6. Creating Vector Data – Digitizing; 7. Creating and
Analysing a Digitial Soil Map; 8. Vector Operations: 'Landscape Analysis
with GIS'; 9. Layout Design.
Introduction to Geographic Information Systems.
Exercises. Wyd. UWM Olsztyn 2008.
Author: Eike Stefan Dobers