Departmental Facilities for Education and Research

The department, located in Lindley Hall on the Lawrence campus, has a broad range of computing resources available for faculty and students. All classrooms and offices have internet access and most classrooms are multimedia ready.

Students have 24-hour access to departmental computing facilities, which currently contain AMD 64 dual-core, AMD 64 and Pentium 4 Windows-based machines. Thirty-six of these units, for general GIS and image-processing instruction, are housed within two identical multipurpose laboratories. Another twelve computers are in a separate facility dedicated to graduate student research and seminars. Scanners, digitizers, and laser printers also are available within these labs while color printing up to poster size may be done (on a case-by-case basis with a materials fee) at the university's Cartographic Services office also located within the department. Ten LINUX computers are available within the department's Weather Lab/Weather Service. These run meteorological software packages such as Integrated Data Viewer, GEMPAK and McIdas.

All computers in the department are equipped with ArcGIS 9.1, Imagine 8.7, ENVI 4.2 and GeoMedia Professional. Other supporting software within the labs includes Photoshop, Freehand and SPSS. Departmental computing facilities are complemented by various university-sponsored labs around campus and cooperative arrangements with other academic departments, the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing program and the Kansas Geological Survey.

In addition to computing facilities, the department has well-equipped laboratories for students working in traditional cartographic production, soils/geomorphology, biogeochemistry (stable isotopes), palynology, and climatology/atmospheric science. The department also maintains an instructional map library and has easy access to extensive map collections at the Spencer Research Library and the university map library.