Research

Geospatial science collects, analyzes, and visualizes data about location. Geospatial science applies to every field of human inquiry: it can help understand how ice sheets respond to a changing climate, visualize how species migrate across ecosystems, and model how a virus moves through human populations. Geospatial science can be used to investigate the relationship of wealth and poverty to political borders or environmental pollution. It can map how ancient trade routes were shaped by natural resources or how society, culture, language, and religion contribute to modern conflicts. If a problem involves factors that vary across space and time, geospatial science can contribute to a deeper understanding.

The availability of big data, development of new information technologies, and rapid advances in cutting-edge sensing technologies has transformed geospatial science into a dynamic and rapidly growing field. But geospatial science is not a stand-alone discipline: it is a set of tools, approaches, and visualizations that can help solve problems across academic fields. The Washington University research community needs to be able to leverage these tools in a way that is available to non-specialists, so that a “long tail” of disciplinary inquiries can benefit from geospatial expertise and integrate these powerful approaches into their research. WUCGS will be an intellectual center focused on applying geospatial tools to big questions and small projects, magnifying the research profile of the university.

Geospatial research @ WashU