ABSTRACT Enhancing and Linking Spatial Analysis and Modeling Facilities for Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences Research Over the past decade there has been growing recognition of the importance of quantitatively understanding natural resources, ecosystems, and environment at landscape to regional, continental, and global levels. Geographic information systems (GIS), with their capabilities for spatial analysis and modeling of diverse datasets, provide a means of understanding and dealing with issues such as biodiversity, habitat fragmentation, effects of climate change, soil erosion, water quality, and impacts of urbanization, to name only a few of many resource and environmental issues that have a spatial dimension. GIS provides a means to organize and analyze the myriad of spatial data associated with these problems. GIS has become an important tool for scientific research, as well as resource management, and it has become an essential research tool for many faculty and graduate students on the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota. Presently, there is GIS activity and varying degrees of capability in six departments in the Colleges of Agriculture, Biological Sciences, and Natural Resources. A growing number of faculty and graduate students are making increased use of our current facilities for GIS and image processing. The present facilities, which reside in individual and departmental laboratories, range from beginning level to advanced; but all need access to more and better facilities than are now available or affordable from individual departments and research grants. The technologies of GIS and related areas are advancing very rapidly. Equipment that was state-of-the-art several years ago is rapidly becoming obsolete. At the same time the scale of the problems being addressed, and therefore the volume of needed data, is rapidly growing and overwhelming the capacity of our present computer systems. This proposal is to develop and link state-of-the-art facilities for spatial analysis and modeling of natural resources and environment in six departments on the St. Paul campus. A distributed system linked by network among the various departments is recommended. We would maintain facilities within our individual departments, but centrally manage the operating system, major software and databases, and selected peripherals. Concurrently we would add expanded and enhanced hardware-software to our campus capability. The equipment requested in this grant proposal would improve the productivity of our faculty and graduate students by: (a) expanding the range and depth of analysis and modeling capabilities available for research applications, (b) increasing access to GIs capability for faculty and student researchers, as well as advanced graduate-level courses which incorporate spatial analysis approaches, by providing additional workstation terminals, (c) enabling us to work on landscape to regional scale issues and problems that require the analysis of large volumes of soil, terrain, and vegetation data, (d) consolidating GIS hardware and software costs and management tasks that are currently being replicated by several research groups on the St. Paul campus will enable us to devote more resources to analysis, (e) alleviating current data storage and access problems by providing additional magnetic disk and read/write optical devices, and (f) providing capability for high quality output that is currently not available. Additionally, we believe this project will bring together researchers from several disciplines to use spatial analysis techniques and that it will foster interdisciplinary approaches to research problems by standardizing certain aspects of our GIS operations and facilitating sharing of data and analytical techniques. Preparation of this proposal has already served to bring together the various researchers from several discip lines with both existing and potential capability to use GIS technology in their research 4
