Representing, Modeling and Visualizing the Natural Environment

 

Introduction to Representing, Modeling, and Visualizing the Natural Environment

Geographic information systems (GIS) provide a range of opportunities for exploring the complexity of the natural environment, offering tools and software packages that undergo continual innovation and development in response to new analytical demands for solutions to spatial problems. Geographic information science (GIScience) provides the academic framework for these technologies, addressing the theoretical and scientific issues associated with the use of GIS . 

This volume explores issues associated with the application of GIS and GIScience to geographic problems associated with the natural environment, particularly addressing the subjects of representation, modeling, and visualization within GIS.

This chapter provides an introduction to the term natural environment, describing its usage in the context of this volume. 

This is followed by an overview of how GIS can be used to explore various aspects of the natural environment. Finally, the three main parts of the volume are introduced, focusing in turn on the key themes of representation, modeling, and visualization of the natural environment.

Preface

The natural environment, including the ways in which humans interact with it, represents a complex and dynamic forum for scientific inquiry, and studies seeking to explore and predict characteristics and processes within this field are necessarily

associated with a strong geospatial element. This volume identifies particular analytical challenges associated with the application of geographical information science

(GIScience) in environmental contexts, and also serves to illustrate broader opportunities and themes relating to the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in other areas of science and social science.

This is the thirteenth volume in a series based on the Geographical Information Science Research UK (GISRUK) Conference Series. The GISRUK Conference Series, established in 1993, provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion and publication of GIS research and the promotion of research collaborations. 

Although GISRUK is a UK-based initiative, it attracts delegates from many countries and covers a diverse range of disciplines. This volume has been developed from research

presented at the GISRUK 2006 Conference held at the University of Nottingham, and the GISRUK 2007 Conference held at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, plus several invited keynote papers and research papers.

The contributions relate to the key themes of representing, modeling, and visualizing the natural environment in the context of GIS. The opening chapter provides an introduction to these themes and introduces each article included in the volume. 

The articles cover a range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues based on a diverse range of environmental applications of GIS, and provide innovative examples of the current state of the art. 

The editors wish to thank the contributors for their time and effort in preparing manuscripts for this volume, the reviewers for their invaluable comments on the manuscripts, and the GISRUK Steering Committee for its assistance with the selection of papers from GISRUK 2006 and 2007. 

We hope that the volume will provide researchers, students, and practitioners in both GIS and the environmental sciences with an overview of the opportunities for utilizing GIS for environmental applications and of some of the ongoing research challenges in this field.

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