LECTURES
Introduction and course overview
Intro Slides, Jockey's Ridge project slides
Data acquisition and integration
- mapping natural phenomena, concept of continuous fields and discrete sampling, on-ground/in-situ, airborne, satellite, and lidar data acquisition
- data repositories, interpreting metadata, evaluating the data, accuracy, uncertainty, scale
- units, projections, coordinate transformations, georeferencing
- geospatial formats, conversions, geospatial data abstraction library
- raster and vector representation, raster-vector conversions and resampling
- essentials in attribute management: import and assigning attributes, preprocessing tools, relational and object oriented geodatabase, structured query language (SQL) basics
Data display and visualization
- display of continuous and discrete data, use of color, shading, symbols to extract the spatial pattern and relationships
- 3D visualization: multiple surfaces and volumes, 3D vector objects
- visualization for data analysis (lighting, zscaling, transparency, cutting planes, animations)
- principles and tools for sharing data on-line (Google earth/maps, Sketchup, GPS visualizer)
Geospatial Analysis I: map algebra, neighborhood operations, buffers
- foundations of analysis of continuous and discrete phenomena
- map algebra
- expressions, operators, functions and variables
- basic calculations, integer and floating point data
- "if" conditions, handling NULLs and creating masks
- neighborhood operations and special operators
- buffers and neighborhood operations
Geospatial Analysis II: cost surfaces, least cost path, landscape structure
- cost surfaces, least cost path
- landscape structure: patches, Shannon's diversity index
Geospatial Analysis III: Spatial interpolation and approximation
- definitions, principles and applications
- resampling and reinterpolation of regular grids
- transformation from vector points or lines to raster
- methods and their properties (IDW, splines, kriging, natural neighbor)
- selecting and optimizing interpolation using splines
- evaluating interpolation accuracy, crossvalidation
- trivariate interpolation of volumes and topo-climatology
Geomorphometry I: Terrain modeling
- 3D mapping technologies: topography and bathymetry
- mathematical and digital terrain models
- point clouds, multiple return data, CLICK, LDART
- triangular irregular networks
- regular grid (raster), NED, SRTM, CRM
- isolines and meshes
- representation of strutctures
Geomorphometry II: Spatial and Temporal Terrain analysis
- summary parameters: volumes, surface areas, roughness index, fractal dimension
- first and second order point parameters: general approach
- methods for slope, aspect and curvatures using polynomial and spline approximation
- combining parameters to map landforms and terrain features
- computing parameters from noisy data, accuracy and uncertainty, scale and level of detail
- raster time series analysis, quantification of coastal change
Geomorphometry III: Viewshed, solar potential analysis
- line of sight, viewshed and cumulative viewshed: general approach
- viewsheds from TIN, DEM and DSM, and terrain with structures
- exact and fast approximate methods, uncertainty and accuracy
- cast shadow and solar irradiation: general approach
- cumulative solar irradiation, solar energy potential
Oct 7 or 16: Midterm
Geomorphometry IV: Flow tracing, watershed analysis
- cumulative terrain parameters based on flow tracing: definitions and general approach (flow path length, flow accumulation, stream networks, watershed boundaries, ridge lines)
- methods for computing flow direction (D*8, Dinf), flow tracing (SFD,MFD, uniform, weighted)
- methods for flow tracing through depressions and flat areas (filling, carving, hybrid, least cost path)
- extracting watershed boundaries, computing watershed hierarchies, estimation of flooded areas
Modeling Geospatial Processes I: Intro
- spatially explicit modeling: principles and applications, role of GIS
- geospatial aspects of models: spatially averaged/distributed, networks, discrete particles and agents
- general approaches and methods: empirical and physics based components of models
- deterministic, stochastic and rule-based models and relevant solvers (FE,FD,PS)
- calibration, validation and sensitivity analysis
- linking models and GIS: full integration (embedded coupling), common interface (tight coupling), data exchange (loose coupling), integration of GIS capabilities with the modeling system (open source)
- web-based modeling
Modeling Geospatial Processes II: Hydro
- spatial hydrologic modeling: processes and methods (precipitation, channel and overland flow, infiltration and subsurface flow, evaporation
- steady state, continuous time and dynamic models and related modeling tools
- deriving input parameters for hydrologic modeling
- analysis and visualization of modeling results
- simulating impact of landuse and climate change
- web-based hydrologic modeling
Modeling of Geospatial Processes III: Erosion and landscape evolution
- spatial modeling of erosion, sediment and pollutant transport and landscape evolution: processes and methods (hillslope erosion, channel evolution, coasts and dunes, landslides)
- steady state, continuous time and dynamic models and related modeling tools
- deriving input parameters for erosion modeling
- analysis and visualization of modeling results
- simulating impact of landuse and climate change
- web-based erosion modeling
GIS Analysis and Modeling with Open source GIS
- Principles of open source software development and use
- Open source geospatial foundation and its projects
- Interoperability, OGC standards, combining open source and proprietary systems
- Contributing to open source as developer and/or user
- Examples of systems and applications