I want to announce Geog 420 - GIS in the Community - being offered this Spring.

In Geog 420, the class works with nonprofit clients in the community to provide them with valuable geographic information services. We have two projects lined up this Spring:

1) Cocke County Partnershp. Cocke County (“The Adventure Side of the Smokies”) is located on I 40 along the North side of the Great Smoky Mountains. It is an economically distressed county. We will be partnering with another class in the Department of Retail, Hospitality and Tourism Management to provide some assistance toward their efforts toward sustainable tourism. Working with this other class, we will be preparing story maps, conducting interviews, making a conducting a photography project and working. This is a mixed quantitative and qualitative project.

There will be some Saturday field trips to Cock County for this project.

2) Trees Knoxville. Trees Knoxville is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and increasing the urban tree canopy in Knox County. Trees Knoxville is asking us to produce maps of tree canopy cover, impervious surface and green space coverage across Knox County. and to produce local estimates of tree cover. Our efforts will help Trees Knoxville to obtain funds to plant more trees and protect existing one in the county, and help make Knox County more sustainable. This project will also be working with Dr. Li’s GEOG 454 Terrain Analysis.

We are looking for so many different levels of expertise and interest that there is a role for everyone to be an expert as well as to learn something new. We are looking for students who can make story maps, who are learning about sustainability or urban and economic development, who are good at photography, have experience with with interviewing people, who have taken a class in GIS programming or remote sensing class, or who know what a regression is, or who want to learn how to work with LIDAR data.

GEOG 420 can be a really rewarding class for students. You get to experience a little of what it’s like to be a geographic consultant, work on challenging, real-world projects that require input from a team of people with different skills and experiences,  gain experience in designing and implementing a real-world project that you can talk about in job interviews, and hopefully make a difference in the community as well.

Please contact me if you have any questions.