GSI: GEOSPATIAL INVESTIGATIONS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY NASA WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

For 5 weeks in the summer of 2005, 16 students from around the world gathered at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, for an innovative, intensive, experiential NASA geospatial workforce development program. To provide for a truly interdisciplinary experience, members of the course were drawn from majors in the liberal arts, such as Art History, Philosophy, and Psychology; the natural sciences, including Geology, Biology, Agronomy, and Meteorology; and engineering. The geospatial workforce development program is designed to train students to understand, integrate, and master geospatial technology. This will lead to more students from a broad range of disciplines pursuing geospatial careers that are vital to NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The GSI program was designed as a unique mix of classroom and field instruction culminating in real-world investigations of environmental, biological, and geological issues in the Charleston, SC region.

Students ranged in experience from sophomores to Ph.D. candidates; from a Fulbright Scholar to students who had never left the state in which they were born. This unique range of students used equipment that included a ground-based Leica HDS3000 3D LASER scanner, handheld GPS and mapping units, and an ASD FieldSpec Pro spectroradiometer. Students learned GIS (ArcGIS), and remote sensing processing and analysis software (ENVI). The program participants became familiar with geospatial data that included LIDAR, ASTER, LANDSAT ETM+, and Hyperian Hyperspectral datasets. The final projects integrated the students, combining participants from both the liberal arts and sciences into groups that used geospatial technology to investigate a problem. All students presented their findings in both oral and poster formats at the end of the class, and also presented their experience at their home institutions.