UEP 150 Geographic Information Science: Environmental Health Problems
Understanding environmental health problems requires knowledge and understanding from many traditional disciplines. These problems are also inherently spatial, as geographic patterns of stressors, health impacts, and population vulnerability are often important to understanding the relationship between environment and healthy. This course teaches students how to access, integrate and quantitatively evaluate many types of spatial information that are important to understanding environmental health. Students combine fundamentals of geography, with GIS (ArcMap) and other software to explore and analyze diverse data with an emphasis on understanding the relationships between multiple determining factors and evaluating statistical relationships. Students will also learn fundamentals of cartography, techniques in quantitative spatial analysis, and introductory spatial statistics. The skills learned in this course and the problem-solving experience from laboratory assignments provide students with a means to better understand environmental health hazard and risk, and enhances their ability to and make datadriven comparisons. GIS and geospatial analysis are important job skills that are useful in a wide variety of careers. Course topics are coordinated with UEP 201. Students are encouraged, but not required, to co-enroll in UEP 201, a course that explores how environmental factors impact human and ecological health.