The USC GIS Research Laboratory develops new analytic tools, builds spatially explicit urban and environmental modeling applications, conducts spatial analysis, and produces customized maps and related information products. The faculty and graduate students affiliated with the lab seek to apply these tools to advance our knowledge of the processes, policies, and practices that help to shape the character of the built and natural environments. Specific projects that we have tackled in recent years include:

• The development of new terrain analysis techniques.
• The development of GIS-based scorecards for evaluating watershed health, biological conservation, and recreational open space opportunities across metropolitan areas.
• The development of web-based map and gazetteer services for digital libraries and archives.
• The assessment of the impacts of land use, urban growth, and conservation policies on urban growth and habitat change.
• The assessment of the environmental and socio-economic characteristics of places and their impacts on selected health outcomes.
• The development of a GIS-based network analysis model for predicting recreational boat traffic on inland waterways.

The geographic perspective captured in these projects provides innovative approaches to problem-solving across a broad swath of environmental and social science topics. For example, some projects focus on the distribution and movement of water across the land surface which is important for identifying and tracing non-point source pollution (among other things). Another group focuses on the mapping of new park and open space expenditures to assess whether they have reduced the often documented disparities in access to these types of resources among different racial, ethnic and socio-economic groups. A third group of projects has examined the growth patterns that are likely to follow the pursuit of different urban land use and growth policies since these (typically) have important consequences for quality of life and environmental protection.

These research projects have been funded by a large number of organizations (e.g. California Department of Boating and Waterways, National Science Foundation, Urban Land Institute-Los Angeles, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) and most of the projects have involved collaboration with other faculty and research units on campus. Current collaborators include faculty and students in the Department of Preventive Medicine (part of the USC Keck School of Medicine); the Lusk Center for Real Estate in the Marshall School of Business and School of Policy, Planning, and Development; the Department of Earth Sciences, Department of Political Science, and Southern California Earthquake Center in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences; the Center for Sustainable Cities in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering; and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Intelligent Systems Division that is a part of the Information Sciences Institute and Integrated Media Systems Center in the School of Engineering.

The Geographic Information Science courses offered by the Department of Geography and other units on campus are informed by these research endeavors and teach the theory and practice of geographic information science to large numbers of graduate and undergraduate students majoring in various disciplines. The graduate students affiliated with the GIS Research Laboratory are particularly accomplished because their formal training is augmented by the experience that is accumulated working as graduate research assistants on one or more funded research projects during their academic programs.

The lab was established in 1997 following the appointment of Dr. John P. Wilson as a professor in the Department of Geography. It is located on the Fourth Floor of Kaprielian Hall and includes faculty, staff, and graduate student offices, a conference room and a large computer laboratory. The lab resources include two servers with nearly one terabyte of online storage, twenty Sun and Dell workstations, numerous peripherals (digitizers, plotters, printers, scanners, etc.), academic site licenses for the Clark Labs, ESRI, Intergraph, and Trimble geospatial software suites, and support for several more specialized geospatial software and environmental modeling packages (e.g. CITYgreen, CURBA, PCRaster, SAS, S-Plus, TAPES, TREES, etc.).