From the Sociology Department to the Environmental Studies Program, CC’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Lab (The Helen and Arthur E. Johnson GIS Lab), located inside the Colket Center for Academic Excellence, continues to help students, faculty, and staff with projects, training, career preparation, and more.
“GIS allows for the exploration of our world in ways that we don’t usually have access to,” says Matt Cooney, Director, GIS Center, who taught Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) during the 2024 Half Block. “When we begin to have new understandings of our environment through the layering of demographic and environmental variables, we can then ask new questions and arrive at new answers that can shape the future.”
The lab provides the campus community with geospatial information and research, trains and helps faculty implement GIS in classes and research, and provides continuing education for alumni. The lab also helps to install GIS software, create videos from drones and GoPro360 cameras, and collect imagery and map data for research sites using drones. The GIS Lab was previously located in Palmer Hall and was moved to the library in August 2017.
“The beauty of the GIS Center/Lab being on the first floor of the library offers us an opportunity to draw people in from many disciplines,” Cooney says. “Since we moved into this space, we get a lot more drop in business so to speak. Students, staff, and faculty see what is going on here and maybe they stop in and ask if they, too, can use GIS for their work or special interests. This space has fostered relationships with more academic and administrative departments that our previous space just couldn’t do.”
“I took the Introduction to GIS Half Block class because I know it is an increasingly advantageous skill to have in the job market and also benefits my major as I will need knowledge of GIS to create models for presentations and research papers,” says Alison Mueller-Hickler ’26, an Environmental Science major and History minor. “It is important for CC students to learn and use GIS technology because it is an amazing way to visually represent spatial data. GIS is important for science communication because the way you represent data can affect the entire message of the map.”
“GIS allows for the exploration of our world in ways that we don’t usually have access to. When we begin to have new understandings of our environment through the layering of demographic and environmental variables, we can then ask new questions and arrive at new answers that can shape the future.”
Matt Cooney, CC’s GIS Center Director
Students in the Intro to GIS Half Block modeled a range of topics for their final project, including plant biodiversity in Oregon and food deserts in Colorado Springs. For her final project, Mueller-Hickler used data from the Florida Keys area and ocean maps from ArcGIS to see if the software can be used for predicative data, specifically for coral bleaching.
“Having a GIS lab on campus is a huge asset as it makes this modeling technology available to every student; whether it is in a class or for a personal project,” says Mueller-Hickler. “The on-campus GIS lab is innovative because it is a form of creative outlet for students, especially for those who are in science majors or simply just curious about data modeling. The GIS lab allows any student to go in and experiment with different ways to portray data.”
Mueller-Hickler also works as a Project Assistant at the State of the Rockies Project and knows that having some familiarity with GIS will help her expand her personal research and allow her to make her findings more accessible to the public.
Ethan Stewart ’25, an Economics major and Environmental Studies minor, is interested in environmental economics and took the Half Block class to learn useful ways he can apply geographic visualizations of relevant data, such as land use, to future research and projects.
“As a visual learner, utilizing GIS has been an incredibly useful and effective tool,” Stewart says. “It is uniquely positioned to aid users in both visualizing and analyzing data in a compelling and efficient manner. While most of the students in our class are Environmental Studies majors or minors, I feel that many different disciplines could benefit from a GIS component. I absolutely plan on returning to the GIS lab for future projects.”
Stewart plans to pursue a venture grant and thinks an ArcGIS StoryMap would be an effective tool for communicating any research he conducts abroad.
“GIS is a really powerful tool that allows students to leverage spatial data to examine so many pressing questions,” says Dr. Charlotte Gabrielsen, Assistant Professor of the CC Environmental Program. “In my classes, I seek to help students understand how GIS can be used to explore solutions to environmental and social challenges. I’ve also advised several senior thesis students and all of them have incorporated GIS and/or remote sensing into their research to some extent, with the majority conducting quite advanced, spatial analyses to address their respective research questions.”
During Block 4, Gabrielsen taught Environmental Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which is structured as a completely hands-on interactive course. Because the GIS Lab has 20 workstations, every student in the class was able to work individually on their own assignments every day of the block.
“We were in the GIS Lab all the time,” says Forrest Tucker ’24, a Music major and Environmental Studies minor who took Environmental GIS with Gabrielsen. “This class could not and would not be the same if we didn’t have the lab on campus. In my first year at CC, during the height of COVID, I took another GIS-related class – but since we couldn’t meet in person, we all had to access the software remotely on our own computers. It worked, but just barely, and it was pretty difficult to learn the skills over Zoom. Comparing that experience to the Block 4 Environmental GIS class, it makes a world of difference to be able to meet together in the lab every day.”
Some days, students in Environmental GIS focused on developing discrete skills, such as learning how to make maps, classifying aerial and satellite imagery, and joining tabular data to spatial objects. Other days, the class worked on broader student-directed projects that used the skills they cultivated to explore their own original research questions.
“Having a GIS lab on campus is a huge asset as it makes this modeling technology available to every student.”
Alison Mueller-Hickler ’26
Gabrielsen believes it is critical for students to be able to communicate spatial data in meaningful and accessible ways. Therefore, she also challenges students to create art pieces for the class’s c[ART]ography art exhibit, where students used various artistic media to communicate an aspect of their research project.
“These art pieces range from abstract embroidered maps, paintings, collage, block prints, photography and digital media, and one student even converted a map of Wisconsin and its waterways into a soundscape,” Gabrielsen says.
“I think the process of problem-solving that we went through when completing our final projects for this class is inherently innovative,” says Cole Pietsch ’24, an Environmental Science major and Spanish minor who took Environmental GIS. “I thought it was a cool experience to, at times, work with professors and GIS staff to use our combined knowledge and familiarity with our subjects to solve problems within GIS. I found that the process never went the way I expected it to and that solutions would have to be prepared with tools I wouldn’t have anticipated using.”
In addition to being interested in GIS, Pietsch took this class to learn the requisite skills for the data analysis in his thesis, where he is using drone imaging and remote sensing to understand how grassland patterns interact with invasive species in Colorado.
“I think GIS is a very important skill in its own right and is very useful to have experience with, but I think learning about GIS also is a good way to learn about how we interpret the world around us in general,” Pietsch says. “The process of interpreting space is way more nuanced and complicated than I had thought before this class.”
In addition to learning how to produce maps and understand coordinate systems and projections, GIS courses at CC prepare students for future careers. Fabio Hornischer ’24 took Environmental GIS because he is an Environmental Science major and kept hearing how important GIS is in his field.
“It’s becoming more of an important skill that is very helpful to market yourself in the environmental field,” Hornischer says. “It’s also super versatile and allows you to conduct a lot of research, so it’s a useful tool that students should know about.”
Hornischer’s research project was on national park visitation and how it was affected by temperature and precipitation trends. In other words, he focused on how climate change might impact visitation by looking at historical visitation, temperature, and precipitation trends.
“GIS is innovative because of its wide variety of uses,” says Hornischer, who learned how to use the GIS software in the class and left knowing how to import and manage files, run statistical tests, and edit maps and files. “It can be used for almost everything. For example, in our class we also had an art project where we could use GIS to create a piece of visual art. This shows the variety of uses of GIS and how it can be used to communicate science in innovative ways.”
“I hope my students gain a better appreciation for the fact that almost any question in any discipline – whether environmentally-focused or otherwise – can be examined spatially,” Gabrielsen says. “My hope is that with this recognition and some foundational skills in spatial analyses, students will be better-equipped to gain a broader understanding of whatever question they are interested in exploring – whether here at CC or as they embark on internship or early-career experiences.”
Classes that utilize GIS technology clearly require large chunks of time in the GIS Lab and many students believe the more time in the lab, the better. At CC, students can spend this important time in the lab because of the Block Plan.
“Having access to a full GIS Lab, with a strong support staff, is an incredibly unique experience,” says Sean Dunbar ’24, an Environmental Science major. “It gave me the opportunity to explore a really interesting environmental question in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to in a traditional classroom setting, while also thinking about that question innovatively to display the data spatially and create a product I was extremely proud of. It was three and a half weeks of complete immersion into a tool that is incredibly useful in my field.”
The GIS Lab is also a very valuable resource to many departments on campus, including Art, Geology, and Sociology.
“The kinds of social phenomena that sociologists are concerned with often involve a spatial dimension for which GIS is well-suited,” says Dr. Wade Roberts, CC Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Sociology Department. “Residential segregation, for instance, is often at the heart of social inequalities and injustices we seek to expose and address. Environmental hazards or amenities are not randomly distributed and often map onto the social characteristics of neighborhoods. Population health, too, is socially and spatially patterned. GIS is an important technology for tracking these concerns and allocating interventions to where they are needed. The practical applications are many.”
Roberts incorporates GIS into many of his classes, including Race, Place, and Environmental Health, Environmental Sociology, and Sociology of Health and Medicine. Several of his students have gone on to use GIS in various fields, including urban planning, housing insecurity, medicine, and public health.
“My classes and my research group heavily lean on GIS, and having a physical space to work – with dedicated, high power workstations – has made much of my students’ work possible and allowed my own research to progress,” says Dr. Sarah Schanz, CC Assistant Professor of Geology. “One of my first thesis students used GIS to calculate landscape roughness and map active landslides, and published the results in a peer-reviewed journal. This work was only possible because she had access to the GIS lab. During COVID, the GIS lab became vital when we couldn’t do field visits; my classes used GIS via the Virtual Lab to build a place-based connection in our online courses. GIS is one of the most marketable skills for geoscience and environmental science students; it’s so important for our students to have this easy access to such a versatile tool, especially considering the high price tag – this is not a software that we can easily install or purchase individually!”
In her upper-level courses, Schanz focuses on her specialty, which is the formation of surface topography via river, glacial, and tectonic action. “The GIS Lab is where we go to analyze these interactions, where we can see landscapes at scales that are hard to visualize in the field,” she says. “Additionally, GIS has an amazing set of tools that allows myself and students to calculate potential energy, curvature, and several other derivative variables that predict areas of erosion and landscape instability over scales of years to millions of years.”
“I decided to take Introduction to GIS because I realized that GIS is a popular preferred skill for geology related internships and jobs,” says Avery Ordner ’26, a Geology major who also took Schanz’s Block 5 Investigating Earth as A Physical System class. “I think it’s important for CC students to learn about GIS technology because it can be used for so many different projects. Before taking the class, I had no idea that it could be used in so many different disciplines. Knowing how to use GIS provides you with a great way to easily visualize and interpret various forms of data.”
Dr. Jennifer Golightly, CC Director of Digital Student Experience and History Lecturer, says the GIS Lab allows students in all fields, including the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, to engage with spatial aspects of their studies in ways that enrich their understanding of the subject.
“Having access to a full GIS Lab, with a strong support staff, is an incredibly unique experience. It gave me the opportunity to explore a really interesting environmental question in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to in a traditional classroom setting.”
Sean Dunbar ’24
“For example, Professor Thakur in Classics did a project for an FYE course in which the students were reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Golightly says. “Professor Thakur asked them to choose a location named in one of the poems in the Metamorphoses, then design a StoryMap about the poem and the location mentioned in the poem using the GIS software. It was clear that the project required the students to read the text extremely closely and repetitively so they could understand what was being said about the location; it also helped them to visualize better the regions and landscapes referred to in the poems. The StoryMap tool is an especially powerful one because students can use it to construct a narrative—a story—about their area of focus and combine this narrative with spatial visualization and multimedia such as video, audio, or still images.”
Professor of Organismal Biology and Ecology Dr. Brian Linkhart developed a teaching unit on developing introductory GIS skills in his Ecology class, which is a required course for Organismal Biology and Ecology majors.
“GIS is a powerful tool for expressing patterns in spatial relationships in nature, and after students in the class develop GIS skills, they then apply them to their field projects so they can make cool maps and examine how variables like severity of wildfires has affected recovery of different forest types and distribution and abundance of animals,” says Linkhart, who added that Cooney and his student assistants are instrumental in helping Linkhart’s students gain these GIS skills.
“Through learning basic GIS skills, students are able to visualize archaeological sites in a new way,” says Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Scott Ingram who utilizes the GIS Lab for his introductory and advanced archaeology classes. “By creating a map of an archaeological site, students are doing the work of professional archaeologists. For the students who want to become archaeologists, they are becoming more qualified for the job market and among the few undergraduates across the U.S. that learn these skill during their undergraduate education. The Block Plan provides the time and the folks at the GIS Lab provide the skills.”
Check out the GIS Lab website for recent GIS projects and more information on GIS technology and opportunities at CC.