What Is Environmental GIS?

Environmental GIS describes the use of location based data management tools to assist in the decision making processes that together form an Environmental Management strategy. The application areas of GIS are varied not only in potential users, but also in environmental sphere and specific environmental issue.

Simply put, a GIS combines layers of information about a place to give a better understanding of that location. Which layers of information are combined depends on the project theme (e.g., tracing a point source pollution event in a stream), planning a wildlife reserve buffer zone, or detecting a relationship between environmental factors and human health trends.

Why Use Environmental GIS?

One of the main benefits of GIS is better resource management both within and outside an organization. A GIS can link data sets together by common locational data, such as addresses or latitude and longitude, which helps members of the public, private environmental companies, and governmental departments share their data. By creating a shared database, information can be collected once and used many times.