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David Tulloch: The Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis is a really interesting
place because we engage in both research and teaching, and as a center, we often try to
bridge between those two. We bring research projects into the classroom with hands-on
classes like the advanced Environmental Geomatics class, but we also hire students to work on
some of the research projects here, both undergraduate and graduate students, shaping some of the
research that we're doing. GIS, which is an acronym for Geographic Information Systems,
is a catch all phrase that we use that includes a lot of computerized mapping. We may throw
in GPS, which more people are familiar with. We also include a lot of remote sensing, and
simply trying to capture spatially a lot of different phenomena that happen in the landscape.
We're suddenly seeing how really informed decisions can be made about the landscapes,
about the places we live, the places we play, and so many government agencies are suddenly
now engaging and using this information to be more informed in all of their decisions
making, but all of this is so new, though we know very little about how it really happens.
Does it change the decision making when you see one kind of map instead of another? Can
we even digest these things? It's a very difficult problem to grapple with, and so some of the
work we do here explores the implications of this, both, a lot of the work we do here
is also just trying to be as innovative as we can and find new ways to apply these tools
to both research and policy decisions. Part of the idea of public participatory GIS is
about getting input from citizens, but part of public participatory GIS is really meant
to be focusing instead on trying to get the government information in the hands of citizen,
that if we're going to have a planning board meeting where we're going to talk about whether
or not we should allow a private property owner to develop major commercial property,
wouldn't it make more sense for the citizens within that community, especially the residents
who live near that site, to be informed, to be able to produce maps, that maybe reinforce
their opinions, but in some other cases, may even help them understand problem spots, maybe
how complex the problem really is, that one of the things we have really seen in the past
is that governments have held their spatial information fairly tightly and at the end
of the day, the citizens made comments that just didn't fit with the situation, so the
citizens' participation was quickly disregarded. Now, they can be more informed if the developer
has access to that information, if the government has access to that information, shouldn't
the public as well? It would be very easy to take the sophisticated land use maps that
are developed by the state agencies in and reduce them down to very simple graphics on
Google Earth so that a nonprofit could do that conversion and put it online, two weeks
before a major hearing, and then have citizens look at that data and study it so that when
they come to the hearing they can point out problem spots in the landscape or areas of
concern. The centers looked a lot at landscape change, and landscape change can be taken
a lot of ways, but one of the particular things we are concerned about is the rapid pace of
development in New Jersey and what the tradeoffs are there. We need to continue to see ways
of addressing housing needs that we have in New Jersey, actually identifying what other
kinds of land uses we're losing, how much farmland, how much forestland, how much wetlands
are we losing. We've developed graphics that show the animation, map out the change from
1972, into the 90's and up to the present day, but when you see it in this different
perspective, and you see it from above, and you see it mapped out, it really focuses you
on how it's happening, and how what seemed kind of spotty, a farm here and a farm there,
it suddenly looks like a wave moving across the landscape. We're going to have development,
but if you can have that animation wave that helps you cognize the problem in a new way
that alters how you see, this development that you thought of as one farm here and one
farm there, and now you can see it's a larger pattern. It may also foreshoot to be much
more productive in your comments, or more constructive in how you suggest what needs
to be saved. One of the things we've put on the website is spatial data that can be downloaded.
When we work on a project, a student project in particular, we like to create some really
good data that can be shared with anyone in the community that might be able to make use
of it, and so our website is a source of actual usable data as well as graphic maps and other
outcomes. When you look at the depth of knowledge that's represented in these materials, I hope
that a lot of its users are really impressed with how much is known about a place that
seems so simple, say the Pinelands. It seems like it's just one kind of landscape, and
one of the maps we have in our gallery shows it broken down into dozens of dozens of different
kinds of landscapes, each of which has not only different characteristics, but different
needs and different problems.
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