GIS: The Technology is There but the Teaching is Yet to Catch Up

Abstract

The human population is increasingly applying destructive pressures on the natural environment to such an extent that the damage is becoming irreversible. We need to educate our young people in strategies of effective and sustainable environmental care, but to do this we need conservation science tools. The biological and mathematical disciplines alone seem inadequate to meet the conservation challenges, as are the computer tools (Breman, 2002). We need Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to reduce the multitude of information available into a manageable form. It seems that at some time in the past 15 to 20 Years, GIS has become the default solution for the integration of large multivariate data sets in almost all terrestrial spatial applications (Aronoff, 1991), and increasingly it is being developed for use in the marine sciences. No longer are professionals turning to paper-based maps and data tables to analyse and interpret data. Instead a GIS application is used allowing not only visualisation of the data set, but also the facilitation of numerical and logical queries on a database, thereby providing an intuitive means to depict complex interrelationships among the data layers (Fonseca et al., 2002). As a result, the past theoretical approaches from geography and ecology have become integrated with powerful databases whose statistical capabilities now allow the ecological sciences to become more predictive, rigorous, and directly integrated into all manner of social, political and resource decisions (Breman, 2002).