Third International Conference/Workshop on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modeling CD-ROM

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
January 21-25, 1996

BACKGROUND

The Third International Conference/Workshop on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modeling was held under the auspices of the U.S. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis in Santa Fe, NM from Sunday January 21 to Thursday January 25, 1996. The conference followed previous meetings in Boulder, Colorado in 1991 and Breckenridge, Colorado in 1993, each attended by over 600 participants.

The conference had three interrelated objectives:

1. To review the current status of digital geographic information for environmental modeling, with particular emphasis on the technical and institutional issues affecting its usefulness and accessibility.
   
   
2. To review progress, with emphasis on the period since the previous conference, in the development of environmental models, and in the exploitation of geographic information technologies, particularly GIS, to support modeling.
   
   
3. To identify areas where progress in the integration of GIS and environmental modeling is likely to be made in the next few years, through improvements in technology, institutional structures, and modeling methods.

The program was organized around three themes, each addressing one of the three objectives:

Data Issues: topics include but are not limited to data quality, reports on new data sources, spatial data infrastructures, new technologies for data access including digital spatial data libraries, intellectual property issues, economics of spatial data provision, metadata and format standards, methods of discretization, data modeling and data structures, methods of spatial analysis including interpolation and regionalization, integration of GIS and remote sensing.

Progress in Modeling: reports and demonstrations of progress in integrating GIS and environmental modeling in such fields as atmospheric science, ecology, oceanography, hydrology, spatial decision support, biodiversity, water and air quality, risk assessment, global environmental change, coupled systems or integrated modeling, and appropriate contributions to the global modeling of carbon, trace gas fluxes, etc.

New Research Frontiers: discussions or demonstrations of research offering potential for new approaches to environmental modeling with GIS, including such topics as cellular automata models, modeling languages, computational modeling systems, new approaches to data modeling including time, 3D, 4D, and global modeling, object oriented systems, and agent- or event-based programming.

In addition to sessions on each of these themes, the conference followed the pattern of previous conferences by including workshops and tutorials on significant topics, informal discussion sessions, poster sessions and demonstrations.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Michael Goodchild, NCGIA
Louis Steyaert, USGS
Bradley Parks, University of Colorado
Michael Crane, USGS
Carol Johnston, University of Minnesota
John Wilson, Montana State University
Denice Shaw, US EPA
Sandi Glendinning, NCGIA

The NCGIA Conference Secretariat
National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis
Phelps Hall 3510
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060, USA

Phone: +1 805 893 8224
FAX: +1 805 893 8617
Email: ncgia@ncgia.ucsb.edu

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