Stephen Brown, assistant professor of environmental science
Research Close-up: Stephen Brown is at the center of a plot
(June 24, 2002)--Stephen Brown, assistant professor of environmental science is principal investigator for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Graduate Fellowship, funded by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. The focus of the fellowship is the natural habitat surrounding the center, which is located just south of downtown Austin. And it was awarded to UTSA with "high distinction."
UTSA researchers and students plotted the wildlife and vegetation of the 1.5 square-mile park using a new application technology developed here called the Internet Geographic Information System, or GIS. What GIS does is to allow a computer user to search for specific environmental characteristics and find where they most often occur. For instance, if researchers wanted to learn why floods occur so often around RV parks, they could input the regions in which the RV parks are located, and find the geographical data of these regions and their similarities. (In this case, one would most likely find that most RV parks are in low-lying areas).
In UTSA's application, the program can be accessed from the Internet. In plotting the wildflower center, for example, researchers were able to detect allergens, tree vegetation, etc. by accessing this program from the Web.
The main objective for the fellowship project is ultimately to make this high-tech software more readily available via the Internet using UTSA software to high schools and school districts that cannot currently afford the program's steep pricetag. This will afford many younger students who are interested in the sciences an increased opportunity to broaden their skills.
In the future, UTSA's Department of Earth and Environmental Science hopes
to expand applications of this technology, using it to collect temperatures
worldwide for ongoing studies of global warming.
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© The University of Texas at San Antonio, 2002