The community of users in education includes instructors (1) who are teaching or conducting research in some aspect of GIScience, such as coding, remote sensing, field methods, geodetic control, web mapping, spatial analysis, or related topics, or (2) who are using GIS as a teaching tool in a discipline, such as business, biology, economics, or health sciences. By extension, this community includes students and supportive deans and other educational administrators. The benefits that these users gain from EO information includes a set of best practices vetted by experts in the field that they can use to teach modern GIS workflows more effectively. The goals of this user community are focused on a deeper and a broader implementation of geotechnology, methods, and spatial data throughout the educational system—primary, secondary, university, and lifelong learning (libraries, museums, and other informal settings). Deeper implementation implies embracing GIS as a platform, including its field data gathering tools and citizen science workflows, spatial analysis, building web maps and apps, communicating with multimedia maps derived from web GIS, systems configuration work, and the coding that is behind modern GIS infrastructure. Broader implementation implies the use of GIS in a multitude of disciplines at all levels of education, formal and informal; occurring wherever changes over space and time are being examined. At all levels of education the challenge of sufficient bandwidth and the use of a professional systems-based tool such as GIS, along with devices capable of running web GIS tools, are barriers in many areas throughout the world. However, educational and societal forces represent a stronger challenge than technological ones. These educational and societal challenges that this user community faces include the lack of educational content standards at the primary and secondary level that support the use of geotechnologies in education, and at the university level, a lack of awareness of and access to modern SaaS GIS tools and open data portals. The risks that the community faces in not facing the challenge of the use of GIS in the education sector is a lack of geographic and spatial literacy among students and faculty. This will translate to research that does not consider spatiotemporal implications of 21st Century challenges, a workforce ill-equipped to deal with them, and consequently an increasingly unstable and dysfunctional world. To build a workforce that can meet global challenges in energy, biodiversity, climate, natural resources, natural hazards, human health, economic inequality, and others, a deep and wide implementation of GIS technology and methods must take place throughout the educational system. The actions that society can take to face that challenge is to provide professional development opportunities for faculty, curricular resources, assessment instruments, relevant spatial data and open data portals, examples of best practices, and a network for educators and researchers in which to interact. EO can provide all of these elements in partnership with educational institutions, government, nonprofits, and industry to meet this challenge. In so doing, an increasingly sustainable, healthier, resilient world can be achieved from the community to the global level.
Assess changes to urban and rural areas
Identify high risk areas produced naturally or by humans
Completed