Campus to take part in GIS Day

Pitt-Bradford will celebrate Geographic Information System Day Nov. 18 with verbal and poster presentations by students and faculty spanning science and technology-based fields.

Posters by students in the biology, petroleum technology, energy science and environmental studies fields will be on display from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the University Room of the Frame-Westerberg Commons. From noon to 2 p.m., faculty will make presentations on GIS and its applications like ecology and petroleum technology. Mapping projects covered will include orphaned oil wells and invasive species.

Additionally, exhibitors from various emergency responders and natural resource agencies will demonstrate how they use GIS in their work.

GIS attaches information to a specific location in a way that can be used to build complex interdisciplinary maps to illustrate data and reveal patterns.

Pitt-Bradford offers an Introduction to Geographic Information Science and Technology course as part of its petroleum technology, environmental studies and energy science and technology programs.

In the past five years, Pitt-Bradford students from various disciplines have taken on a handful of GIS-related projects. Beginning in 2011, applied anthropology students teamed up with computer information systems and technology instructor Jeremy Callinan and student Steve Trumbull '13.

The CIS&T team built a Trailmaker mobile application that continues to be used by successive students to map places of interest in the communities of Smethport, Bradford, Warren and Kane. Trumbull's work on the app helped land him a job as a contractor with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management National Operations Center in Denver, Colo.

In 2014, senior Brittni Cumberland '15 used and expanded her GIS experience during an internship with the Western New York Nuclear Service Center near West Valley, N.Y., where she helped introduce a GIS mapping project to map groundwater elevation levels in reference to ground surface elevation.

This past summer, junior Jonathan Heck, an environmental studies major from Pittsburgh, served as an intern on a GIS trail-mapping project in Allegany (N.Y.) State Park.

GIS Day provides an international forum for GIS users to demonstrate real-world applications. For more information on GIS Day, visit www.gisday.com.