Professor Fernanda Lopez Ornelas loves maps. As the Geospatial Analysis Lab (GsAL) Manager, it kind of comes with the territory, but it’s safe to say that for Fernanda, it goes a bit deeper than that. In fact, she loves them so much that she has a tattoo of the world’s continents on her arm.
There’s no doubt that maps and visuals can be used to tell a powerful story. Whether you’re sharing the latest findings on birds and biodiversity, healthcare disparity, or peatlands in northern Canada, visuals are what bring your data to life — transforming it from a list of statistics and graphs to a real-world, tangible conclusion. If you want to make sure your data makes an impact in Environmental Management, look no further than the GsAL: a place where undergraduate and graduate students alike can research, learn the ArcGIS software and work with the latest technology to draw powerful conclusions and tell compelling stories with environmental data.
Fernanda and her team have clearly worked hard to create a comfortable learning environment for students. It’s not often you see a couch in a lab! The donated grey sectional is just the first of many thoughtful amenities to make students’ learning experience more comfortable and enjoyable. With the chatter of students collaborating in the background, we sat down with Fernanda to discuss her experience with GIS – from student to professor and lab manager.
First, what is GIS?
GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems – or science, some people will argue those two. Regardless of what the acronym stands for, GIS represents anything that has to do with geospatial science and encompasses a wide variety of analytical methods and tools that allow processing of data with a geographic or geospatial component.
You were one of the first USF students to earn a GIS certificate. What motivated you to seek a career in GIS?
When I was in college in Mexico, I took a two-day GIS workshop. I loved it! I remember someone saying that if you want to pursue a career in conservation and biodiversity, you need to know GIS. That stuck with me as I continued my education.
I eventually came to USF to study Environmental Management. When I was a student, there was a class — Intro to Geospatial Technologies. That advice from all those years ago was still in my head, so I took the class. The professor later reached out to gauge my interest in a GIS certificate, asking if I would be interested in being one of the first students to go through a potential program. I said, one hundred percent! I love GIS, count me in. So they developed this class called Advanced GIS, and I joined seven other students as the first cohort to take that class, complete the requirements, and graduate with the first GIS certificate at USF.
That advice really made an impact on your career! So what are the applications of GIS in environmental management?
There are so many applications of GIS. Any question or dataset that has a geospatial or geographic component, you can use GIS to analyse. Specifically, in environmental management, you can use GIS to study things like droughts, forests, wildfire management or species management. The latter involves a lot of site suitability analysis, which is very popular with students. It can help determine where species are distributed or find the perfect location for rehabilitation. Say you want to find the perfect location for eagles to nest in California so we can protect those areas. You start putting layers on top of layers of information and say, okay — eagles need forests, so we can eliminate any area that’s not a forest. And then you can say, well, the location needs to be within so many miles of a water source. So then you start using layers of information to find those perfect locations that have all the characteristics for eagles to create their nests.
How recent is the technology?
Oh, GIS has been here forever. It used to be just part of geography, at a time when maps were done by hand on paper. As technology started to evolve, we moved to the screen. Now, we have interactive maps, not just in 2D, but 3D! And they’re all interactable. Before, we did everything on paper — the concept has always been around, it was just called a different thing – cartography. Maps have been with us for a long time.
Has GIS changed much technologically in recent years?
Oh, yes. Like crazy! One of the challenges we have as educators is to ensure that all the classes are updated and relevant. GIS is a science that has been evolving at a very rapid pace: similar to all sciences that benefit from improvements in computational resources, it changes every year, there’s always something new, opening new opportunities for answering harder questions, analyzing more data and connecting more dots. We work hard to keep up with everything and ensure we offer the best education for our students. GIS also pairs well with new technologies like AI and machine learning, and we try to teach all of that here at USF.
What is the most interesting application of GIS that you have seen?
I feel like every year, there’s something new coming up, and all applications are quite interesting. I’m more interested in LiDAR, a way of creating 3D maps using lasers. One application that fascinates me is using LiDAR to create a 3D map of a forest without touching the forest at all. Then you can digitally remove all the trees to see what’s underneath. This is really useful in archaeology; a lot of scientists have been able to identify and find lost cities, ancient cities, using that technology. I find it fascinating.
Laser Archaeology: Revealing the Amazon’s Urban Jungle with LiDAR
What classes do you offer for the GIS certificate? If you can name a few.
Our certificate here at USF requires ten units, and students in our MS in Environmental Management (MSEM) can complete it as part of their program requirements. For MSEM students, the certificate requires the completion of three core classes, including an Intro GIS class, an Applied GIS class and a scripting class. We added the scripting requirement recently because we know that coding is becoming very important in all jobs, and the skill makes our students more competitive on the job market. We don’t require the students to become programmers. Students get intimidated by the coding part of it, but quickly find out that learning the fundamentals and working with specific applications is enough to allow them to be able to identify and to solve problems based on that.
After students complete the three core classes, they take two additional elective classes. We offer a wide range of classes for the electives, including, Google Earth Engine, GIS for Wildfire Management, GIS for Water Management, Intro to LiDAR Technologies, Drone Technologies and Advanced Data Analysis, which is more like Geospatial Analytics.
There are so many – GIS for Health, Remote Sensing, and importantly, we always tell our students that if there’s a specific technology they’re interested in, they can come to us and we’ll find someone to teach it. If there’s a demand for it, we’ll make sure we have a class available. This is what happened with our upcoming GIS for Greenhouse Gas Accounting class, which we will be offering in the Spring!
Learn more about our Graduate GIS Certificate.
Who would you recommend the GIS certificate to?
Any student at USF – not only in environmental science or environmental management. Any student who would like to learn about maps and be able to create their own maps should take at least one GIS class. GIS has many applications in public health, urban studies, environmental studies, economics, energy and more.
Also, students don’t have to complete the certificate, they can just take the courses that they need to obtain the skills to understand maps, create their own maps and tell a story with them, which are skills that will always set them apart in their careers.
